# Full-Duplex Interaction in Spoken Dialogue Systems: A Comprehensive Study from the ICASSP 2026 HumDial Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19595/) (2026)
- [Overcoming State Inertia in Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models via Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11386/) (2026)
- [DuplexWorld: Can voice agents help you get through the day?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10716/) (2026)
- [MSI-Bench: Evaluating Multi-Speaker Voice Interaction for Collaborative AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24812/) (2026)
- [Omni-DuplexEval: Evaluating Real-time Duplex Omni-modal Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17360/) (2026)
- [MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13076/) (2026)
- [Same Words, Different Actions: Paired Turn-Taking Evaluation under Rewritten Dialogue Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17360/) (2026)
- [Full-Duplex Speech Models Take the Floor When Asked, Not When Needed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19596/) (2026)
- [When Patients Cut In: Extending Clinical Conversational AI Safety to Interruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29241/) (2026)
- [Continue, Adapt, or Yield: In-Turn Adaptation to Overlapping Speech in Full-Duplex Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13117/) (2026)
- [DuplexAct-Bench: Broadening Full-Duplex Speech Evaluation toward Proactive Interaction across Diverse Behavioral Requirements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39446/) (2026)
- [DuplexAgent-RSI: Recursive Harness Improvement for Full-Duplex Voice Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11299/) (2026)
- [DuplexAct: How Interactive Are Frontier Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17738/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Full-duplex interaction, where speakers and listeners converse simultaneously, is a key element of human communication often missing from traditional spoken dialogue systems. These systems, based on rigid turn-taking paradigms, struggle to respond naturally in dynamic conversations. The Full-Duplex Interaction Track of ICASSP 2026 Human-like Spoken Dialogue Systems Challenge (HumDial Challenge) aims to advance the evaluation of full-duplex systems by offering a framework for handling real-time interruptions, speech overlap, and dynamic turn negotiation. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for full-duplex spoken dialogue systems, built from the HumDial Challenge. We release a high-quality dual-channel dataset of real human-recorded conversations, capturing interruptions, overlapping speech, and feedback mechanisms. This dataset forms the basis for the HumDial-FDBench benchmark, which assesses a system's ability to handle interruptions while maintaining conversational flow. Additionally, we create a public leaderboard to compare the performance of open-source and proprietary models, promoting transparent, reproducible evaluation. These resources support the development of more responsive, adaptive, and human-like dialogue systems.
