ParaBridge: Bridging Paralinguistic Perception and Dialogue Behavior in Speech Language Models
Speech carries more information than just words: a child's voice, a fearful tone, or a noisy background should all lead a sufficiently competent spoken-dialogue assistant to different replies. Current Speech Language Models (SLMs) can recognize such paralinguistic cues but often ignore them in open-ended dialogue. We observe that a simple paralinguistic instruction scaffold at the inference stage narrows this perception-behavior gap, suggesting that the relevant cues are already latent in the model. Such scaffolds, however, remain brittle under multi-turn context and competing instructions. Therefore, we propose \textbf{ParaBridge}, an on-policy self-distillation method that turns a britt...
| Authors | Yuxiang Wang, Qinke Ni, Shengbo Cai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 September 2026 |
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