Optimizing Conversational Quality in Spoken Dialogue Systems with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Arora, Siddhant, Tian, Jinchuan, Shi, Jiatong, Futami, Hayato, Kashiwagi, Yosuke, Tsunoo, Emiru, Watanabe, Shinji
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Arora, Siddhant
Tian, Jinchuan
Shi, Jiatong
Futami, Hayato
Kashiwagi, Yosuke
Tsunoo, Emiru
Watanabe, Shinji
author_facet Arora, Siddhant
Tian, Jinchuan
Shi, Jiatong
Futami, Hayato
Kashiwagi, Yosuke
Tsunoo, Emiru
Watanabe, Shinji
contents Reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback (RLHF/RLAIF) for speech-in/speech-out dialogue systems (SDS) remains underexplored, with prior work largely limited to single semantic rewards applied at the utterance level. Such setups overlook the multi-dimensional and multi-modal nature of conversational quality, which encompasses semantic coherence, audio naturalness, speaker consistency, emotion alignment, and turn-taking behavior. Moreover, they are fundamentally mismatched with duplex spoken dialogue systems that generate responses incrementally, where agents must make decisions based on partial utterances. We address these limitations with the first multi-reward RLAIF framework for SDS, combining semantic, audio-quality, and emotion-consistency rewards. To align utterance-level preferences with incremental, blockwise decoding in duplex models, we apply turn-level preference sampling and aggregate per-block log-probabilities within a single DPO objective. We present the first systematic study of preference learning for improving SDS quality in both multi-turn Chain-of-Thought and blockwise duplex models, and release a multi-reward DPO dataset to support reproducible research. Experiments show that single-reward RLAIF selectively improves its targeted metric, while joint multi-reward training yields consistent gains across semantic quality and audio naturalness. These results highlight the importance of holistic, multi-reward alignment for practical conversational SDS.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19063
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimizing Conversational Quality in Spoken Dialogue Systems with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
Arora, Siddhant
Tian, Jinchuan
Shi, Jiatong
Futami, Hayato
Kashiwagi, Yosuke
Tsunoo, Emiru
Watanabe, Shinji
Computation and Language
Sound
Reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback (RLHF/RLAIF) for speech-in/speech-out dialogue systems (SDS) remains underexplored, with prior work largely limited to single semantic rewards applied at the utterance level. Such setups overlook the multi-dimensional and multi-modal nature of conversational quality, which encompasses semantic coherence, audio naturalness, speaker consistency, emotion alignment, and turn-taking behavior. Moreover, they are fundamentally mismatched with duplex spoken dialogue systems that generate responses incrementally, where agents must make decisions based on partial utterances. We address these limitations with the first multi-reward RLAIF framework for SDS, combining semantic, audio-quality, and emotion-consistency rewards. To align utterance-level preferences with incremental, blockwise decoding in duplex models, we apply turn-level preference sampling and aggregate per-block log-probabilities within a single DPO objective. We present the first systematic study of preference learning for improving SDS quality in both multi-turn Chain-of-Thought and blockwise duplex models, and release a multi-reward DPO dataset to support reproducible research. Experiments show that single-reward RLAIF selectively improves its targeted metric, while joint multi-reward training yields consistent gains across semantic quality and audio naturalness. These results highlight the importance of holistic, multi-reward alignment for practical conversational SDS.
title Optimizing Conversational Quality in Spoken Dialogue Systems with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
topic Computation and Language
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19063