@inproceedings{wu-etal-2026-chronological,
title = "Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models",
author = "Wu, Donghang and
Zhang, Haoyang and
Chen, Chen and
Zhang, Tianyu and
Tian, Fei and
Yang, Xuerui and
Yu, Gang and
Liu, Hexin and
Hou, Nana and
Hu, Yuchen and
Chng, Eng Siong",
editor = "Choi, Jinho D. and
Chen, Yun-Nung and
Funakoshi, Kotaro and
Emami, Ali",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue",
month = aug,
year = "2026",
address = "Atlanta, Georgia, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.33/",
pages = "473--485",
abstract = "Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics."
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<abstract>Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models
%A Wu, Donghang
%A Zhang, Haoyang
%A Chen, Chen
%A Zhang, Tianyu
%A Tian, Fei
%A Yang, Xuerui
%A Yu, Gang
%A Liu, Hexin
%A Hou, Nana
%A Hu, Yuchen
%A Chng, Eng Siong
%Y Choi, Jinho D.
%Y Chen, Yun-Nung
%Y Funakoshi, Kotaro
%Y Emami, Ali
%S Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
%D 2026
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Atlanta, Georgia, USA
%F wu-etal-2026-chronological
%X Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.33/
%P 473-485
Markdown (Informal)
[Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.33/) (Wu et al., SIGDIAL 2026)
ACL
- Donghang Wu, Haoyang Zhang, Chen Chen, Tianyu Zhang, Fei Tian, Xuerui Yang, Gang Yu, Hexin Liu, Nana Hou, Yuchen Hu, and Eng Siong Chng. 2026. Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 473–485, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.