Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

Multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition Using Modality-specific Self-Supervised Frameworks

Emotion recognition is a topic of significant interest in assistive robotics due to the need to equip robots with the ability to comprehend human behavior, facilitating their effective interaction in our society. Consequently, efficient and dependable emotion recognition systems supporting optimal human-machine communication are required. Multi-modality (including speech, audio, text, images, and videos) is typically exploited in emotion recognition tasks. Much relevant research is based on merging multiple data modalities and training deep learning models utilizing low-level data representations. However, most existing emotion databases are not large (or complex) enough to allow machine learning approaches to learn detailed representations. This paper explores modalityspecific pre-trained transformer frameworks for self-supervised learning of speech and text representations for data-efficient emotion recognition while achieving state-of-the-art performance in recognizing emotions. This model applies feature-level fusion using nonverbal cue data points from motion capture to provide multimodal speech emotion recognition. The model was trained using the publicly available IEMOCAP dataset, achieving an overall accuracy of 77.58% for four emotions, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches