Frame selection is a fundamental component of multimodal large language models, enabling long videos to be processed under limited visual-token and computational budgets. Uniform sampling preserves temporal coverage but may miss informative content that appears only briefly. To alleviate this limitation, query-dependent methods can retrieve question-relevant frames. However, because the selected frames depend on the current question, the same visual input cannot be directly shared across different questions, and frame selection must be repeated in multi-turn video dialogue. This motivates us to seek a query-independent frame selection method that preserves the reusability of a fixed visual input while improving the coverage of informative events beyond uniform sampling. We propose Multi-Signal Event Modeling and Dynamic Rescoring (MEDR), a training-free and query-independent frame selection method. Multi-Signal Event Modeling organizes complementary visual, motion, and text signals into signal-specific temporal events. Dynamic Rescoring then iteratively reevaluates each candidate relative to the current selected set, updating its score according to frame-level signal strength, additional event coverage, and temporal proximity. The resulting fixed frame set is constructed without observing the query and can be reused across different questions. On the standard benchmark evaluations, MEDR improves model accuracy by 0.63%-0.89% on Video-MME. On the long-video subset of LongVideoBench, it improves accuracy by up to 1.23% with Qwen3-VL-8B. MEDR further improves overall accuracy by 0.53%, while reusing exactly the same frame set for every question about a video.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15058
Multimodal dialogue retrieval aims to retrieve dialogues from multimodal dialogue banks that are similar to a target dialogue in terms of both textual semantics and acoustic conversational styles. Such dialogue-level retrieval is crucial for many dialogue-related tasks, including Emotion Recognition in Conversation, Spoken Dialogue Systems, and Conversational Speech Synthesis, where external dialogue examples can provide valuable semantic and stylistic references. However, existing retrieval methods are still largely limited to utterance-level or unimodal matching, and often fail to capture the global semantic coherence and stylistic consistency of an entire dialogue. To address this gap, we propose S2Dialog, a unified framework for dialogue-level semantic-style retrieval from multimodal dialogue banks. Specifically, S2Dialog consists of a Dialogue-level Textual Retriever and a Dialogue-level Acoustic Retriever, which encode the textual and acoustic modalities of a dialogue into dialogue-level representations, respectively. To further enhance multimodal retrieval, we introduce Dialogue-level Textual-Acoustic Contrastive Learning, which aligns semantically and stylistically similar dialogues while distinguishing unrelated ones. Extensive experiments on the multimodal dialogue dataset DailyTalk demonstrate that S2Dialog achieves outstanding retrieval performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14029
LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict. Preferences depend on context, behavior evolves, and sources can conflict. When a query lacks context, time, or source authority to interpret conflict, treating one memory as definitive converts unresolved conflict into an unjustified, overconfident action. Existing benchmarks recover one answer from conflicting evidence, overlooking whether agents recognize underdetermination, preserve alternatives, seek missing information, and choose appropriate actions. We introduce \underline{T}esting \underline{A}gents' \underline{N}avigation of \underline{G}enuine, \underline{L}atent, and \underline{E}ntangled Memory Conflicts (\textsc{TANGLE}), a benchmark for genuinely unresolvable memory conflicts. It comprises 541 instances across 40 personas and three types: Context-Partitioned Conflict (CPC), Behavior-Oscillation Conflict (BOC), and Source-Contradiction Conflict (SCC). We evaluate two tracks---an oracle track with curated memory and a pipeline track that extracts memory from multi-session dialogues---on five dimensions: conflict perception, causal reasoning, confidence calibration, clarification seeking, and memory faithfulness. Experiments reveal pipeline challenges. With curated memory, models recognize conflicts more reliably than they calibrate actions or seek targeted clarification. With end-to-end pipeline memory, extraction fails to preserve conflict-bearing relations needed for downstream reasoning. Policy comparisons show fixed rules are insufficient when actions must reflect conflict. These findings motivate Conflict-Aware Action Policy (CAAP), which adapts actions to each conflict using available evidence. \textsc{TANGLE} frames conflict handling as recognizing underdetermination, retaining conflicting evidence, and acting without forcing a definitive answer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13921
Audits of generative AI (GenAI) systems often summarize behavior as a reported rate: how often the audited system complies with policy. Researchers and stakeholders use that rate to compare systems, track regressions, and gate deployment. A reported rate reflects both the system under audit and the measurement choices behind it, so a change in the rate can leave it unclear whether the system or those choices moved. We introduce ASSERT, a specification-driven measurement pipeline for GenAI audits that ties each reported rate to a written specification of the measurement choices used to produce it. ASSERT helps draft a behavioral rubric and test cases, then runs the audit against a GenAI system and returns a reported rate. In a case study on conversational deception, we observe that the reported rate moves substantially with the dialogue setup, the simulated user, the judge, and the evidence bar for non-compliance. These measurement choices substantially change the reported rate and can reorder GenAI system rankings. Because each reported rate is tied to an explicit specification, differences across audits are easier to attribute and interpret.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13840
Conversational advertising aims to deliver useful ads within multi-turn assistant interactions. Unlike conventional query-based advertising, where the user's intent is often expressed in a short standalone query, conversational ads must infer latent commercial intent from the current user query, the assistant response, and dialogue history while also deciding whether an ad would be helpful rather than intrusive. We propose AdsWorldEngine, an agentic framework for conversational advertising. AdsWorldEngine uses an Opportunity Gate to determine whether ads should be shown, an Orchestrator to generate commercial intents, call advertising tools, and construct a top-3 ad slate, and an Evaluator to score delivered ads for offline optimization. The central contribution is an iterative actor-tool training procedure: we first train the Orchestrator with supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, then use high- and low-reward rollouts to construct preference data to train tools. This creates a self-improving loop in which the system learns not only how to use advertising tools, but also how to improve them from rewarded behavior. To support subjective production decisions, we introduce label grounded judgment modeling, which trains judgment models from human labels collected under explicit guidelines. It enriches labels with thinking traces, filters inconsistent rationales through reflection, and further optimizes binary judgments with a cost sensitive GRPO variant that preserves asymmetric reward gaps. Offline, AdsWorldEngine improves diversity by 60% and relevance by 80% over the current production ad delivery system. In an online A/B test, it increases RPM by 22% and ads coverage by 74%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13833
Spoken dialogue is a natural form of human--computer interaction, yet most speech language models remain limited to turn-based operation and lack real-time adaptability, such as user barge-in. Recent duplex speech-to-speech and speech-to-text models reduce latency by replacing multi-stage pipelines, but often compromise speech quality because accurate ASR, interruption handling, and high-fidelity synthesis must be optimized jointly. We propose VoiceChat-TTS, a low-latency, continuous, and streamable text-to-speech model for interactive agents. VoiceChat-TTS is driven directly by LLM text-token streams, supports explicit interruption via control tokens, and produces silence when no textual input is available. The model enables always-on, responsive speech generation while preserving modularity and high speech quality, and it supports mid-utterance interruptions without resetting the KV cache.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13831
Streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) underperforms on domain-shifted target audio, where labeled in-domain data is costly to prepare while unlabeled audio is abundant. We present StreamHear, a semi-supervised pipeline that adapts a pretrained streaming student by fine-tuning an offline transducer teacher on the labeled training set, generating pseudo-labels on the unlabeled portion, and fine-tuning the student on the mixture. We further introduce a prior-regularized dynamic-programming realignment step that fixes chunk-level word placement using an ASR-hypothesis anchor. Across four datasets spanning financial calls, prepared read speech, and phone-quality dialogue, StreamHear consistently outperforms supervised student fine-tuning and narrows the gap to the offline teacher.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13717
As language-model-based AI is increasingly deployed in autonomous settings, aligning its goals and values with those of humans becomes critical. Today, alignment, and the assistant identity itself, are typically introduced only after pretraining, once behavioral priors are already established. This can make values a thin overlay, rather than deeply rooted, and facilitate subsequent misalignment. Pursuing a different paradigm, we introduce Synthetic Persona Pretraining (SPP), which installs the desired assistant persona from token zero in pretraining. First, we annotate pretraining documents with value-aligned first-person reflections derived from a normative value constitution. Second, we pretrain via the standard cross-entropy loss on standard pretraining documents as well as their reflections, which installs the desired persona among a multitude of other personas. Finally, we post-train on user-assistant dialogue data, which binds this desired persona to the assistant identity, a process we call persona binding. By pretraining models up to 3B parameters on 500B tokens, we show that SPP improves constitution following and jailbreak robustness, and reduces the misalignment rate in out-of-distribution moral dilemmas, while preserving capabilities. Early intervention matters: compared with alignment from token zero, introducing SPP only at the end of pretraining yields weaker constitution adherence, does not shift value priorities, and leads to less aligned choices in dilemmas. This advantage depends on persona binding and, importantly, increases with pretraining budget. Overall, our results show that shaping values early is critical for alignment and establish pretraining-time persona interventions as an effective approach to do so.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13482
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied for emotional companionship, evaluating their behavior and capabilities in intimate relationships has become a pressing issue. However, existing assessments primarily characterize general personality traits, providing limited insight into model behavior within intimate and emotionally sensitive contexts. Therefore, we introduce adult attachment theory into LLM evaluation and use the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) scale to characterize attachment anxiety and avoidance. To evaluate emotional companionship capabilities of LLMs in realistic interaction scenarios, we present an emotional companionship benchmark, ECBench, spanning four scenarios including emotional support, collaborative tasks, conflict resolution, and social guidance, across friendship and romantic relationships. ECBench is utilized to assess model behavior using 11 dialogue-quality metrics and three evaluation methods. We evaluate the attachment tendencies of 32 LLMs and select representative models to investigate how these tendencies manifest in contextualized multi-turn interactions and whether they can be shaped through prompting. Our study provides a theoretical lens from psychology, along with practical tools to understand and select LLMs for emotional companionship.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13168
Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia. No existing instrument measures this influence per clause, predicts it before delivery, or repairs it under matched budgets. \sysname{} closes the three gaps through the model API alone: a contract ledger pairs every constraint with an executable checker, records revocations as tombstones, and compiles the net constraint state ahead of time into a single specification; a sequential ablation probe measures per-clause adherence and incremental behavioral effect; a repair ladder operates under token- and attempt-matched budgets. On \dataname{} (\NTasks{} HumanEval tasks, \NClauses{} verified checkers), relapse at an 8B operating point climbs from \ScaleDelayedMTwo{} to \ScaleDelayedMEight{} as constraint load grows, while stronger models sit at floor. Under matched checkers, model, and budget, ahead-of-time compilation significantly reduces relapse against a no-ledger verifier-retry baseline (\RestoreDiff{}, 95\% CI \RestoreDiffCI{}, $p$ \RestoreDiffP{}); adaptive ladder interventions stacked on top add no detectable gain (95\% confidence excludes gains $\geq$ \LadderExcludedGain{}). The probe predicts relapse before delivery (AUROC \AurocPrimary{}); a one-sentence tombstone note recovers about a third of the compilation effect and survives a placebo control. At \CostDeliveryFactor{} delivery overhead and \CostTotalHedged{} of API compute for every result, revocation failure becomes a measurable, predictable, and repairable property of dialogue state rather than an invisible one.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12599
Developing dialogue systems capable of engaging in multi-turn, goal-oriented conversations remains a significant challenge, especially in specialized domains with limited data. This research proposes a novel framework called Preference Tree Optimization (PTO), designed to iteratively improve agent models in such dialogue systems, by generating preference data using a method called Preference Tree with Look-Ahead. Focusing on Motivational Interviewing (MI) -- a counseling technique aimed at facilitating behavioral change -- we leverage virtual patients and an oracle evaluator to simulate conversations and generate rich preference datasets. By combining this method with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), we aim to enhance the agent's decision-making capabilities over iterative training cycles. The proposed framework addresses data scarcity and advances the development of more nuanced and effective dialogue systems in goal-oriented domains. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the PTO framework enhances dialogue agents' performance in goal-oriented conversations within the domain of Motivational Interviewing (MI). Models trained with PTO consistently outperformed the baseline in key metrics such as session satisfaction and working alliance. Additionally, incorporating look-ahead simulations led to improved long-term planning and more effective conversational strategies, with deeper look-ahead configurations yielding the most stable and high-scoring results.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12062
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have created new opportunities for wearable speech interfaces, with smart glasses providing an egocentric platform for continuous audio sensing and assistance. However, speech recognition and understanding in this setting remain challenging because of dynamic acoustic conditions, speaker overlap, and the spatial ambiguity introduced by wearer-centered recording geometry. To support systematic evaluation in this setting, we introduce the IEEE SLT 2026 SmartGlasses Challenge for egocentric multi-speaker speech processing. The challenge consists of two tracks, Dyadic Dialogue Understanding and Multi-party Meeting Understanding, and jointly evaluates Time-Stamped Speaker-Attributed Automatic Speech Recognition (TSA-ASR) and Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). It is built on a 106-hour four-channel egocentric speech dataset containing 714 sessions collected in real-world scenarios. This paper describes challenge tasks, dataset construction, submissions, and summarizes the main findings from the shared evaluation. The results show that heavy speaker overlap remains a major factor affecting TSA-ASR performance, while paralinguistic acoustic understanding continues to be difficult for current audio-language models in complex SLU settings. Further details can be found on the official challenge website.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12034
Feedback processes strongly influence student learning, yet their educational value depends on addressing two distinct challenges: providing high-quality, timely, and individualised feedback at scale, and supporting students to interpret, evaluate, and act on that feedback productively. Generative AI offers a credible means of addressing the provision challenge, but students' uptake of AI-generated feedback remains limited. We conducted a large-scale quasi-experimental sequential cohort study comparing three AI-mediated feedback workflows across 13,037 students and 51,296 student-authored resources. In Directed Feedback (n = 3,723), students received AI-generated feedback comments without structured support. In Self-Directed Feedback (n = 3,951), students could initiate optional AI-supported dialogue. In Enacted Feedback (n = 5,363), students were prompted to select feedback suggestions, evaluate their relevance, and engage in targeted AI-supported dialogue anchored to those selections. Enacted Feedback was associated with significantly higher uptake of AI-generated feedback, with an estimated probability of 26.2%, compared with 14.1% for Directed Feedback and 0.1% for Self-Directed Feedback. It was also associated with significantly higher self-assessment confidence and submitted-work quality than both comparison conditions. These findings suggest that the educational value of AI-generated feedback depends not only on the quality of feedback comments, but also on workflows that actively structure students' enactment of feedback literacy processes. The results have implications for the design of AI feedback systems that position learners as active participants in judgement, dialogue, and improvement rather than passive recipients of comments. Overall findings show that AI access alone is insufficient; purposeful workflow design is central to productive feedback use.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11625
Large language model-based shopping agents are increasingly deployed in real-world e-commerce platforms, generating massive amounts of user interaction logs that provide valuable supervision for improving these agents. However, existing approaches primarily rely on offline training signals, such as user-item interactions or synthetic preference data, while largely overlooking the rich supervision contained in users' natural conversational feedback. Moreover, the available online feedback is heterogeneous, sparse, and noisy, making it difficult to transform into reliable learning signals automatically. To address these challenges, we propose LOFA, a framework that enables shopping agents to learn directly from real online interaction logs without human annotation. LOFA combines reinforcement learning over verifiable purchase outcomes with feedback-aware on-policy distillation, which identifies users'in-dialogue directives and converts them into dense token-level supervision. These complementary objectives capture both collaborative behavioral patterns and user-specific preferences. Extensive experiments on real-world e-commerce logs demonstrate that LOFA consistently improves recommendation quality, response helpfulness, and user-satisfaction alignment over strong baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of learning shopping agents from real online user feedback.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11604
Video-to-music generation has drawn growing interest for its role in conveying the emotion of visual media, including film. Progress in the field, however, is hampered by a reproducibility gap: models are often trained on crawled corpora referenced through YouTube URLs that may be deleted, with the underlying data often difficult and time-consuming to retrieve. To address this, we introduce the Open Screen Soundtrack Library version 2 (OSSL-v2), a self-hosted corpus of 34,343 video clips totaling 246.4 hours, sourced from public-domain films. Unlike crawled corpora, OSSL-v2 is reproducible (i.e., not subject to link rot) and copyright-conscious, yet still large enough to train functional video-to-music models. We then use this film-domain corpus to study dialogue as a conditioning signal for video-to-music generation, motivated by the close temporal coupling between film music and on-screen speech. Specifically, we augment existing models' video cross-attention with a time axis and modulate it frame-by-frame with the dialogue track. Evaluated on both public-domain and commercial films, our approach shows improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. The dataset is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11576
Ubiquitous robotic systems often lack traditional visual interfaces, necessitating resilient natural language interaction for maintenance and repair tasks. This paper presents a goal oriented agentic AI architecture designed to enable non-expert users to perform technical repairs through situated dialogue. The framework utilizes a multi-layered approach that decouples high-level strategic planning from reactive conversational execution to transform unconstrained human instructions into a structured hierarchy of goals. We conducted a study involving twenty participants to evaluate the system's efficacy using a physical hardware testbed. The architecture achieved a 95\% task completion rate, and participants reported positive self-efficacy following real-time guidance that adapted to conversational diversions and linguistic variations. A comparative analysis with an online baseline revealed that the transition to a physical environment significantly decreased perceived social presence (p=.0005), and trust and competence, (p=.037), while the agentic framework remained robust throughout the interaction. These findings indicate that goal oriented agentic AI can support the sustainability of body-worn technologies by empowering users to perform critical maintenance in ubiquitous contexts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26157
Synthetic dialogue generation offers a way to study conversational dynamics in sensitive domains where real data are difficult to access, release, or annotate. The underlying abuse may occur online or offline: threats and coercion can appear directly in messages, while behaviours such as surveillance, isolation, stalking, and physical violence may be planned, disclosed, or referred to conversationally. Privacy and legal constraints make it difficult the release of large-scale real conversation datasets; existing work has mostly focused on sentence-level toxicity of online abuses, leaving a gap in modelling abuse as a relational and temporally unfolding phenomenon. In this work, we focus on modelling Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) scenarios as multi-turn dialogues. We introduce ConVAWG, a retrieval-grounded framework for generating CPS-aligned synthetic VAWG chat dialogues. ConVAWG builds scenarios from persona seeds, demographic patterns reported by the UK Office for National Statistics, official crime definitions, and retrieved Domestic Homicide Review cases; converts them into hierarchical event timelines; generates multi-scene role-play dialogues; and applies targeted activation-steered toxicity control to appropriate utterances. We release over 6,000 multi-turn dialogue events across 200 scenarios with rich scenario-, event-, and turn-level metadata. Extensive human evaluation, LLM-as-Judge assessment, ablations, and downstream tasks show strong dialogue quality and domain fidelity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11200
We prove inference-time quantum coordination advantages for specified AI state-tracking tasks. A solver compresses semantic history into a future-accessible boundary state and later answers a query. We count communication $B$, persistent instance-dependent memory $M$, and local work $D$; classical recurrence, caches, tools, and recomputation are allowed and charged. The central result is a boundary-preserving semantic-compilation theorem. It maps a finite one-way, streaming, or adaptive causal task into a semantic AI interface while preserving event order and access to past input. Classical boundary-state lower bounds and quantum-memory upper bounds transfer up to explicit compiler overhead, independently of the finite-precision recurrent architecture. Two applications have classical semantics. Matched-entity synopsis QA inherits the hidden-matching separation between $O(\log N)$ qubits and $\Omega(\sqrt{N})$ classical boundary bits. Continual requirements auditing inherits a Max-$k$SAT streaming separation: a recurrent solver uses $O(\log^5 n\log(1/\delta))$ qubits and polylogarithmic classical workspace to obtain a $0.7172$-approximation, whereas every classical one-pass finite-information solver attaining that ratio requires $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ coordination width. As a quantum-native compiler test, a stabilizer latent-state dialogue uses $n$ qubits, while every exact finite-state classical causal online realization satisfies $B+M \ge \frac{1}{2}n^2+(\frac{3}{2}-\log_2 3)n+O(1)$. The source protocols, streaming algorithms, and stabilizer witness are imported; the new result is their architecture-independent semantic transfer. These are memory and coordination separations, not runtime or empirical advantages for present-day language models. The stabilizer result assumes exact simulation and ideal noiseless quantum memory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11066
Although Whisper models benefit from large-scale multilingual pre-training, their performance on Burmese medical speech remains limited. This work presents a Burmese medical speech recognition framework built on a high-quality 28-hour corpus recorded and validated by native speakers. We fine-tune Whisper models using full fine-tuning (FFT) and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) with LoRA. To evaluate robustness, we apply waveform- and spectrogram-level data augmentation under controlled noise and simulated room acoustics. While augmentation reduces performance on clean speech, it significantly improves robustness in noisy and reverberant environments across FFT and PEFT settings. Our best-performing system, fully fine-tuned myMediWhisper-Medium without augmentation, achieves a state-of-the-art Word Error Rate (WER) of 23.44%, outperforming much larger general-domain fine-tuned models. Dataset and other resources can be found at the Huggingface repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11036
Accurate and responsive turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems, which must distinguish in real time between user interruptions, backchannels that should be ignored, and the completion of an utterance. Prior modular approaches typically optimize turn state prediction at the utterance or fixed-chunk level, creating a mismatch with the continuous turn state estimate, and often depend on an auxiliary ASR model, which limits responsiveness and increases overall system complexity. Therefore, we present X2-Turn, a frame-synchronous turn state prediction method via delayed-stream modeling. Specifically, building on the pretrained Voxtral Realtime model, we introduce a frame-synchronous turn state head that operates in parallel with the ASR head on shared streaming representations, jointly predicting ASR tokens and fine-grained turn states at the frame level. We evaluate our method on the bilingual Chinese-English Easy-Turn test sets, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in achieving accurate turn-taking detection while maintaining low latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10878