# The ICASSP 2026 HumDial Challenge: Benchmarking Human-like Spoken Dialogue Systems in the LLM Era

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05564 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05564/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Kimi-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18425/) (2025)
- [VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01957/) (2025)
- [Full-Duplex-Bench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Full-duplex Spoken Dialogue Models on Turn-taking Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04721/) (2025)
- [Step-Audio: Unified Understanding and Generation in Intelligent Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11946/) (2025)
- [EmoBench-M: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04424/) (2025)
- [MER 2024: Semi-Supervised Learning, Noise Robustness, and Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17113/) (2024)
- [MTalk-Bench: Evaluating Speech-to-Speech Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues via Arena-style and Rubrics Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18240/) (2025)
- [Does Your Voice Assistant Remember? Analyzing Conversational Context Recall and Utilization in Voice Interaction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19759/) (2025)
- [MULTI-Bench: A Multi-Turn Interactive Benchmark for Assessing Emotional Intelligence ability of Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00850/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [DuplexWorld: Can voice agents help you get through the day?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10716/) (2026)
- [M3-DuplexBench: A Multi-Turn, Multilingual, Multidomain Benchmark for Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29125/) (2026)
- [A frontend-backend architecture for tool calls in full-duplex speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19334/) (2026)
- [Unit-Based Agent for Semi-Cascaded Full-Duplex Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20230/) (2026)
- [PolySpeech-100: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across 100+ Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01016/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Audio-LLMs and Omni-models, spoken dialogue systems have evolved significantly, progressively narrowing the gap between human-machine and human-human interactions. Achieving truly ``human-like'' communication necessitates a dual capability: emotional intelligence to perceive and resonate with users' emotional states, and robust interaction mechanisms to navigate the dynamic, natural flow of conversation, such as real-time turn-taking. Therefore, we launched the first Human-like Spoken Dialogue Systems Challenge (HumDial) at ICASSP 2026 to benchmark these dual capabilities. Anchored by a sizable dataset derived from authentic human conversations, this initiative establishes a fair evaluation platform across two tracks: (1) Emotional Intelligence, targeting long-term emotion understanding and empathetic generation; and (2) Full-Duplex Interaction, systematically evaluating real-time decision-making under `` listening-while-speaking'' conditions. This paper summarizes the dataset, track configurations, and the final results.