# Full-duplex Spoken Language Modeling with Discrete Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17780 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17780/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07524/) (2024)
- [SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11000/) (2023)
- [Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01743/) (2025)
- [Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19737/) (2024)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Generalizing Verifiable Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02833/) (2025)
- [MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17399/) (2025)
- [Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00774/) (2024)
- [Full-Duplex-Bench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Full-duplex Spoken Dialogue Models on Turn-taking Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04721/) (2025)
- [Spoken Question Answering and Speech Continuation Using Spectrogram-Powered LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15255/) (2023)
- [PersonaPlex: Voice and Role Control for Full Duplex Conversational Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06053/) (2026)
- [OmniFlatten: An End-to-end GPT Model for Seamless Voice Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17799/) (2024)
- [Full-Duplex-Bench-v3: Benchmarking Tool Use for Full-Duplex Voice Agents Under Real-World Disfluency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04847/) (2026)
- [SALM-Duplex: Efficient and Direct Duplex Modeling for Speech-to-Speech Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15670/) (2025)
- [Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05722/) (2026)
- [X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24596/) (2026)
- [DIFFA: Large Language Diffusion Models Can Listen and Understand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18452/) (2025)
- [The Silent Thought: Modeling Internal Cognition in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models via Latent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17837/) (2026)
- [TransFusion: Transcribing Speech with Multinomial Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07677/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Listen, Look, Speak and Act](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16756/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06540/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Diffuplex, a full-duplex spoken language model based on discrete diffusion that achieves an unprecedented balance between linguistic intelligence and response efficiency. With thinking mode, Diffuplex delivers 13.0 tokens per forward pass, reaching an average of 1872 tokens per second and substantially surpassing the frontier autoregressive (AR) models in decoding speed. Without thinking, Diffuplex matches the first-audio latency of existing full-duplex models while achieving markedly stronger linguistic intelligence. This capability is enabled by separating when to say from what to say at the training level, rather than compressing both into a single autoregressive timeline. During inference, Diffuplex continuously tracks the user speech through an AR interaction policy, while independently generating and refining response content through parallel diffusion. Consequently, semantic computation is no longer bounded by the perception audio frame rate, allowing intelligence and responsiveness to improve simultaneously. Taken together, these results establish a new paradigm for spoken agents that can sustain real-time dialogue while devoting parallel computation to intelligent response generation. Training code and checkpoints will be avaliable soon.