# XTurnix: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Turn Control through Two-State Binary Decisions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04400/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [Voice Activity Projection: Self-supervised Learning of Turn-taking Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09812/) (2022)
- [TurnGPT: a Transformer-based Language Model for Predicting Turn-taking in Spoken Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10874/) (2020)
- [FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06502/) (2025)
- [SoulX-Duplug: Plug-and-Play Streaming State Prediction Module for Realtime Full-Duplex Speech Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14877/) (2026)
- [DualTurn: Learning Turn-Taking from Dual-Channel Generative Speech Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08216/) (2026)
- [X2-Turn: Frame-Synchronous Dual-Head Modeling for Joint Streaming ASR and Turn State Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10878/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

General turn-taking behavior in real-time dialogue systems requires deciding whether to keep listening or start responding while listening, and whether to continue or stop while speaking. Existing turn detectors use heterogeneous, task-specific label spaces and are often trained on limited annotations or evaluated on isolated utterances, making them difficult to use as a unified causal controller with comprehensive context. We propose XTurnix, a compact text-based model that formulates turn control as two binary decisions conditioned on the AI's current listening or speaking state and predicts a single control token from the complete dialogue history. XTurnix is pretrained on 5.5 million causal action examples automatically derived from timestamped two-speaker transcripts, then fine-tuned on synthetic multi-turn examples with a flatter distribution across the four state-action labels. We evaluate XTurnix on four public benchmarks and a balanced self-curated benchmark. Across the public benchmarks, XTurnix achieves the best results on all SemanticVAD and LiveKit splits, ties the native Smart-Turn model on Smart-Turn Bench, and achieves the highest incomplete-turn accuracy on Easy-Turn. On the self-curated benchmark, it reaches 89.06% accuracy, more than 20 percentage points above the strongest third-party baseline at 68.75%, while maintaining F1 scores between 84.21% and 90.63% across all four categories. These results demonstrate unified listening- and speaking-state turn control in a single compact model. Code is available at https://github.com/xcc-zach/xturnix, with an interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/xcczach/xturnix-demo.