# IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19595 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19595/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 17 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17399/) (2025)
- [Full-Duplex-Bench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Full-duplex Spoken Dialogue Models on Turn-taking Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04721/) (2025)
- [Full-Duplex-Bench v1.5: Evaluating Overlap Handling for Full-Duplex Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23159/) (2025)
- [Full-Duplex-Bench-v2: A Multi-Turn Evaluation Framework for Duplex Dialogue Systems with an Automated Examiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07838/) (2025)
- [Full-Duplex-Bench-v3: Benchmarking Tool Use for Full-Duplex Voice Agents Under Real-World Disfluency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04847/) (2026)
- [τ-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13686/) (2026)
- [MTR-DuplexBench: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Round Conversations for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10262/) (2025)
- [From Self-Evolving Synthetic Data to Verifiable-Reward RL: Post-Training Multi-turn Interactive Tool-Using Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22607/) (2026)
- [EVA-Bench: A New End-to-end Framework for Evaluating Voice Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13841/) (2026)
- [FLEXI: Benchmarking Full-duplex Human-LLM Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22243/) (2025)
- [Full-Duplex Interaction in Spoken Dialogue Systems: A Comprehensive Study from the ICASSP 2026 HumDial Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21406/) (2026)
- [Instruct-FD: Can Your Full-Duplex Speech System Follow Turn-Taking Instructions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20460/) (2026)
- [Submodular Benchmark Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02209/) (2026)

## 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)
- [MSI-Bench: Evaluating Multi-Speaker Voice Interaction for Collaborative AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24812/) (2026)
- [When Patients Cut In: Extending Clinical Conversational AI Safety to Interruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29241/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Real-Time Voice Agents: From Component Quality to Grounded Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30798/) (2026)
- [Prompts versus Rules: Auditing and Controlling Speech Naturalness Behaviors in Voice User Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11015/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.