Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models

Xinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Xu Han, Zihang Xu, Yuanwei Xu, Weilin Zhao, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu


Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly permeate daily lives, there is a growing demand for real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. Traditional turn-based chat systems driven by LLMs prevent users from verbally interacting with the system while generating responses.To overcome these limitations, we adapt existing LLMs to duplex models so that they can listen to users while generating output and dynamically adjust themselves to provide instant feedback.Specifically, we divide the queries and responses of conversations into several time slices and then adopt a time-division-multiplexing (TDM) encoding-decoding strategy to process these slices pseudo-simultaneously.Furthermore, to make LLMs proficient enough to handle real-time conversations, we build a fine-tuning dataset consisting of alternating time slices of queries and responses and covering typical feedback types in instantaneous interactions.Our experiments show that although the queries and responses of conversations are segmented into incomplete slices for processing, LLMs can preserve their original performance on standard benchmarks with a few fine-tuning steps on our dataset. Automatic and human evaluation indicate that duplex models make user-AI interactions more natural and human-like, and greatly improve user satisfaction compared to vanilla LLMs. Our duplex model and dataset will be released soon.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.644
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11543–11557
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.644
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Xu Han, Zihang Xu, Yuanwei Xu, Weilin Zhao, Maosong Sun, and Zhiyuan Liu. 2024. Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11543–11557, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.644.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.644.software.zip
Data:
 2024.emnlp-main.644.data.zip