Feng Jiang Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Zhiyu Lin, Yiyang Liu Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Liumeng Xue, Fan Bu, Yuhao Du, Xiangying Chen, Benyou Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 等 9 位作者
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally reshaped speech-to-speech (S2S) systems, enabling increasingly natural spoken interaction. However, existing benchmarks still rely heavily on text-based evaluation and largely ignore paralinguistic cues such as prosody, emotion, and speaker traits, which are central to expressive and human-like communication. We introduce S2S-Arena, a speech-native benchmark for evaluating instruction-following S2S models with explicit assessment of both semantic understanding and paralinguistic expression. S2S-Arena features a four-level interaction protocol that systematically probes models under increasing paralinguistic complexity, a two-stage data construction pipeline that produces 1,243 speech samples spanning 100+ real-world tasks, and an arena-style evaluation framework that enables reference-free, pairwise comparison directly in the speech modality. Benchmarking 10 state-of-the-art S2S systems over 1,000+ comparisons reveals substantial performance gaps (especially under complex paralinguistic demands) between current academic and industrial systems. Our analysis further identifies key design factors governing expressive instruction following, providing actionable insights for building more natural, robust, and human-aligned speech agents.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xin Chen Nanjing University, Feng Jiang Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Yiqian Zhang, Hardy Chen, Shuo Yan University of Texas at Dallas, Wenya Xie University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Min Yang, Shujian Huang Nanjing University
Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a blind self-thinking paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70% higher accuracy, 22.90% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表