Cough events during live spoken conversations carry clinically valuable respiratory signals, yet existing dialogue systems treat them as acoustic noise to be discarded. We present HealthCUES (Clinical Understanding from Embodied Sounds), a streaming pipeline for paralinguistic respiratory monitoring in real-time conversational agents, a capability that, to the best of our knowledge, is absent from all prior systems. HealthCUES processes audio through a rolling buffer aligned with dialogue turn boundaries, enabling sub-second event detection without interrupting conversational flow. Beyond binary cough detection, the system provides fine-grained analytics: (i) differentiation between coughing and throat clearing, (ii) cough subtype classification (dry, wet, barking, whooping) with confidence scores, and (iii) temporal duration estimation with start-end boundaries. To prevent alert fatigue, HealthCUES introduces dialogue-aware gating mechanisms that modulate triggering based on conversational context. The system leverages Qwen3Omni, a multimodal large language model (MLLM), with constrained structured outputs, decomposing cough analysis into parallel prediction tasks for independent prompt optimization. Evaluation on 847 in-house conversational audio segments demonstrates 93\% F1 for cough detection, 0.75 weighted-F1 for wet/dry subtype classification, and average end-to-end latency of 340ms; external validation on the AMI meeting corpus confirms robust cough, throat-clearing, and speech separation in the presence of speech (0.91 macro-F1). A user study with licensed healthcare professionals confirms the clinical relevance of subtype information and the system's utility in telehealth workflows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26163
Safety-critical mental-health support systems must distinguish when supportive conversation is appropriate from when free-form generation should be blocked. This paper presents Anian, a safety-gated multimodal AI backend for perinatal mental-health support and mindfulness-intervention routing. Anian is not intended to diagnose psychiatric conditions or replace clinical care or crisis intervention. Its modular pipeline places generative AI downstream of structured state representation, conservative risk fusion, and response gating. User text or voice-derived ASR transcripts are mapped into four linked layers: L1 emotion states, L2 psychosocial constructs, L3 safety risk, and L4 intervention routes. Local text- and rule-based safety evidence is fused with external voice-derived evidence using a highest-risk-priority rule, S_fusion = max(S_local, S_external). At moderate or high fused risk, ordinary AI-generated responses and text-to-speech delivery are blocked and replaced by fixed safety content and prompts for human support. An internal prototype evaluation used approximately 858,295 normalized records from public emotion, dialogue, mental-health-related, and Chinese dialogue corpora within a weak-label and rule-derived framework. Micro-F1 scores were 0.9604 for L1 emotion classification, 0.9144 for L2 psychosocial constructs, and 0.9742 for L4 routing. In a controlled safety stress test of 233 samples, the L3 rule engine achieved high-risk recall of 1.0000 within predefined scenarios. These findings support the internal feasibility of the label framework and gating logic but do not establish clinical validity, diagnostic accuracy, real-world safety, or effectiveness. We report the architecture, ontology, safety-fusion mechanism, prototype evaluation, error-analysis plan, and roadmap for expert-reviewed and real-world validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26162
Generative AI is profoundly transforming the core technologies behind conversational systems, shifting from component-based to end-to-end approaches. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) may still generate inconsistencies, a critical issue particularly in Task-Oriented Dialogues (TODs), where system responses must strictly adhere to information from a domain knowledge base (e.g., restaurants in a city). A single hallucination (e.g., suggesting a non-existent restaurant) can lead to severe task failures. We investigate a method for automatically detecting inconsistencies by conceptualizing TODs as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), where variables represent dialogue segments referencing the conversational domain, and constraints among variables capture dialogue properties such as turn coherence and adherence to domain knowledge. We propose a pipeline that first identifies variables in a target dialogue and then applies a CSP solver to identify valid solutions. By comparing the target dialogue with valid variable assignments, we can detect inconsistencies and suggest minimal changes to ensure dialogue consistency. We demonstrate the high accuracy of the CSP-based approach in detecting inconsistencies, and provide a detailed analysis of our findings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09338
Embodied agent teams powered by heterogeneous large language models (LLMs) are being widely deployed in physical artificial intelligence such as smart factories, warehouses, and service robotics. To enable collaboration among such an agent team, efficient coordination mechanisms that operate reliably under limited network resources are required. However, existing heterogeneous LLM-agent coordination frameworks that rely on multi-round natural-language-based conversations introduce three coupled challenges. First, inter-agent dialogue incurs communication overhead that grows rapidly with team size. Second, the quality of coordination is constrained by the heterogeneous capabilities of the agent team's LLMs. Third, agents may suffer from action delays due to iterative negotiation. To address these challenges, we propose LDT-Coord, a networked coordination framework built upon a lightweight digital twin (DT). Specifically, each agent independently selects its intended action and reports both the action decision and a structured temporal constraint over shared resources to the DT server, thereby decoupling coordination performance from natural-language reasoning ability. Then, DT executes a training-free, rule-based orchestrator algorithm to resolve cross-agent conflicts and returns coordination instructions to prevent such conflicts. To further reduce communication overhead, we formulate agent reporting control as a constrained partially observable Markov decision process (C-POMDP) and solve it with the PPO-Lagrangian algorithm. Simulation results show that LDT-Coord achieves a task success rate comparable to conventional coordination methods while reducing communication overhead by more than 70x and maintaining robustness under LLM heterogeneity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09330
Modern LLM-agent frameworks increasingly interoperate through standards such as Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agent-to-tool access and Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol for agent delegation and negotiation. However, these protocols specify transport and discovery rather than strategic correctness and do not guarantee efficient, individually rational, or strategy-proof outcomes. We introduce a framework that (i) encodes classical negotiation mechanisms, including alternating-offers bargaining and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-style auctions, as constraints over A2A message schemas; (ii) provides a lightweight runtime verification and repair layer that checks messages against protocol invariants; and (iii) offers a benchmark of negotiation and allocation tasks with known optimal solutions for measuring deviations from game-theoretic predictions. We evaluate multiple LLM backbones using unstructured dialogue, structured protocols, and structured protocols with verification. Across negotiation trials (N=30 per condition), verification reduces outcome variance, while structured protocols achieve 100 percent success for both models. After correcting parser artifacts, audited unstructured baselines achieve approximately 97 percent and 93.3 percent success. In auction experiments (N=30 per model), both models achieve 100 percent efficient allocation but differ sharply in truthful bidding: one bids its exact valuation in every trial, whereas the other does so in only 3.3 percent of trials. Thus, mechanism-level incentive compatibility does not automatically transfer to LLM-agent behavior. A three-party fair-allocation task produced only 4.2 percent usable outcomes; we report this negative result with a diagnosis. This work bridges classical multi-agent systems theory and modern LLM-agent infrastructure and defines verifiable interaction at the A2A protocol layer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14613
While the existence of postmortem privacy is increasingly acknowledged (such as the protection of the presence of deceased within digital spaces), far less attention has been paid to its internal instability: its scope (the extent of its application), justificatory foundations (why do we protect the deceased in the first place), and uneven articulation across jurisdictions (for example, some jurisdictions may tolerate or endorse practices that may be contestable in a different jurisdiction). This piece unearths the internal diversity of the concept by illuminating specific points of tension and conflict that the notion of postmortem privacy evokes. These points of tension are collectively refer to as the politics of postmortem privacy. To do so, this paper organises existing contributions of legal scholarship, placing them in dialogue with broader cultural, social, historical and political observations to illustrate the politics of postmortem privacy through three different loci of analysis: the transatlantic divide between European and American approaches, intra-European tensions within data protection governance, and postcolonial and post-authoritarian contexts in the Global South. While existing literature has glimpsed toward the former two, this piece contends that the latter deserves greater attention and inclusion in the debates around privacy and the dead. The piece explains, in continuity with existing scholarship, how postmortem privacy is assembled differently as a productive register through which societies negotiate memory and dignity, which play a great role in the governance of data of the dead and information flows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16905
Recent unified multimodal models show a single architecture can jointly perform vision/language understanding and image generation/editing. However, they repeatedly feed all historical visual and textual inputs into a shared context window, limiting long-horizon multimodal dialogue due to visual token explosion and unreliable cross-turn referencing. We propose a Cognitive-structured Multimodal Agent that externalizes visual information into an Episodic Visual Memory and selectively reactivates relevant episodes during reasoning. The agent consists of a Perceptual Abstraction Engine for structured visual abstraction, a Cognitive Retrieval Engine for cross-turn memory retrieval, and a Multimodal Executive Controller for autonomous task inference and action planning. To address the lack of turn-level retrieval supervision in existing datasets, we develop a Unified Scenario Engine that programmatically generates structured multi-turn conversations with fine-grained retrieval annotations, enabling reinforcement learning to optimize abstraction and retrieval policies. We also construct a long-horizon visual-dialogue benchmark stratified by difficulty to evaluate episodic visual recall. Our 8B agent achieves 91.4% retrieval accuracy over 20-turn sessions, surpassing 32B baselines by +8.2% while nearly halving per-turn inference time (23.1s -> 12.7s). We further present the Cognitive-structured Multimodal Agent Harness (CMA-Harness), a tool-augmented deployment of the same cognitive structure integrating persistent multimodal memory, web access, image generation/editing/composition tools, and OpenAI-compatible serving. Structured memory and modular decision-making offer a more scalable, efficient paradigm for long-horizon multimodal agents than monolithic parameter scaling. Code: this https URL ; Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08497
Synthetic multi-speaker conversations are widely used to train conversational automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but it remains unclear which timing properties make simulated data most useful. This paper studies conversational timing as a controllable training variable rather than merely as a corpus statistic to be reproduced. We parameterize pause and overlap timing distributions with an exponential-tilting family estimated from multiple conversational corpora, and then explore the resulting four-dimensional parameter space with Latin hypercube sampling and multi-objective Bayesian optimization. Each sampled timing configuration is used to generate simulated training conversations, train an ASR system, and evaluate concatenated-permutation word and character error rates (cpWER and cpCER) on a Hungarian dialogue corpus. The results show that downstream ASR behavior is explained more directly by induced timing statistics than by raw simulator coordinates or corpus proximity. In particular, higher overlap exposure is associated with lower cpWER, whereas longer and more variable gaps are associated with higher cpWER; cpCER follows the same trend, but with weaker statistical support. Bayesian optimization yields modest aggregate improvements, but its main value is analytical: it produces controlled timing interventions that reveal an overlap--gap trade-off in simulated conversational training data. These findings suggest that realistic simulation should be complemented by task-relevant diagnostics of overlap, gap, and timing-variability profiles.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08371
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on isolated psychiatric tasks, including dialogue, diagnosis, and treatment planning, yet existing benchmarks rarely simulate complete psychiatric clinical encounters. We introduce $\textbf{MentalHospital}$, a virtual evaluation environment for LLM-based psychiatric clinical encounters. MentalHospital instantiates the Subjective Interviewing, Objective Examination, Diagnostic Assessment, and Treatment Planning (S.O.A.P.) workflow, using skill-augmented standardized patients constructed from 1,193 de-identified psychiatric electronic health record (EHR) cases spanning all major ICD-11 categories and 76 disorders. Each encounter is assessed through a dual-track protocol that combines objective comparison against EHR-derived references with subjective assessment of clinical process quality. To scale specialist judgment, we develop $\textbf{MentalEval}$, five domain-specific evaluators covering communication empathy, interviewing professionalism, clinical-note quality, diagnostic rigor, and treatment appropriateness, trained with rubric-grounded SFT and expert-guided DPO. Survey responses from 22 clinicians support MentalHospital's clinical fidelity (3.88/5), while MentalEval achieves strong expert alignment with an average QWK of 0.944. Benchmarking shows that even the strongest LLM trails clinicians by 37.28 percentage points in objective psychiatric competence, with mental status assessment as a key bottleneck.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08257
Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially advanced persona-based dialogue agents for emotion-sensitive role simulation in healthcare, education, counseling, customer service, and interactive storytelling. However, two related lines of work leave a key gap. Persona-based dialogue systems often encode emotions as static traits or surface-level stylistic cues, and affective dialogue research has largely focused on empathetic response generation toward users rather than modeling the agent persona's own evolving emotional state. As a result, trigger-driven emotional evolution within a character remains underexplored. To address this limitation, we draw inspiration from the Component Process Model (CPM), a psychological theory that views emotion as a dynamic process shaped by the appraisal of external events. We propose CPM-MultiAgent, a CPM-grounded emotion evolution multi-agent framework for supporting emotional changes in persona-based dialogue. Instead of treating a character's emotion as a fixed attribute, CPM-MultiAgent represents it as a latent state that is continuously reshaped by dialogue triggers. Through affective trigger extraction, CPM-based collaborative appraisal, and emotion state updating, the framework enables more emotionally consistent role simulation in multi-turn this http URL with baseline comparisons, ablation studies, human evaluation, and case analyses demonstrate that CPM-MultiAgent effectively models dynamic emotional evolution in emotionally sensitive role-simulation settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07824
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as important tools in healthcare, showing growing potential for clinical reasoning and patient care. This survey examines recent progress in medical LLMs, focusing on reasoning applications and requirements. We present a dual-view approach that connects clinical practice with computational methods. On the clinical side, we establish a five-level competency scheme following Miller's Pyramid, progressing from knowledge recall to dynamic case management. On the computational side, we link deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning patterns to common medical goals and tasks. We also introduce a benchmark dataset spanning five levels of medical reasoning capability and report results on 18 state-of-the-art models, revealing that medical specialist models excel in diagnosis-centric tasks while general models lead in decision support and dialogue. We conclude by discussing current progress and open challenges, including data limitations, hallucination, and grounding issues, and outline directions toward safer, more reliable, and workflow-ready systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07761
Safety for generalist robots is usually discussed in terms of motion or dialogue. We argue a third question is missing: should the robot take its first hard-to-undo social action at all, such as a greeting, an uninvited grasp, or stepping into someone's space? We call this initiation authorization. Current frameworks rarely treat it as a separate safety layer. Today's stacks often skip this step: a high engagement score or a confident VLA rollout is treated as permission to act. But seeing a person is not the same as having their consent to be addressed. We frame initiation authorization within generalist-robot safety and contrast it with post-plan VLA guardrails, implementing PAS (probe-authorize-speak) on a doorway humanoid, comparing it with direct-init on logged traces, and proposing a three-condition user study, with open questions on metrics, governance, and where initiation ends and foundation-model generation begins.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07420
Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel. Block-parallel drafters such as DFlash further improve drafting efficiency by predicting an entire block in one pass, but their position-wise predictions lack explicit intra-block causal conditioning. Recent methods such as Domino and DSpark attempt to introduce such causality into block-parallel drafting, but they require training the draft model from scratch, which limits their flexibility and increases training cost. We propose DeLS-Spec, a decoupled long-short context speculative decoding method. DeLS-Spec treats the fixed DFlash model as a long-context expert and introduces a lightweight local head as a short-context expert. The local head can be trained independently with a standard next-token prediction objective, without joint training with the target model or the DFlash backbone, leading to extremely low training cost. At inference time, DeLS-Spec combines long-context and short-context logits, and the local head is not tied to a specific DFlash checkpoint, making the method more modular and flexible. Experiments on Qwen3 models show that DeLS-Spec consistently improves speedup and average acceptance length over DFlash across math, code, and dialogue benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07409
Mathematical reasoning benchmarks typically provide all facts needed to solve each problem, while interactive benchmarks often mix reasoning with tools, retrieval, and long-horizon dialogue. We introduce MIRA-Math, a benchmark for a narrower diagnostic capability: solving mathematical problems whose full latent state has a unique answer, but whose solver-facing view is missing exactly one necessary atomic fact. The solver must request the missing information in natural language under a strict budget and then integrate the returned fact into an exact final answer. A fixed constrained LLM responder sees only the dataset-provided atomic fact and must either offer the quoted fact when the request matches it, or decline otherwise. Thus, instance generation, typed hint specifications, validation, and final-answer verification are deterministic, while request metrics are measured under a fixed LLM-mediated responder channel. MIRA-Math contains 2{,}310 generated instances from 22 typed mathematical families spanning algebra, probability, linear systems, discrete structures, signal processing, Markov chains, circuits, interpolation, and numerical boundary-value problems. Experiments across frontier and small models show that request success and final-answer accuracy are separable: models may ask for the right fact yet fail the downstream computation, or fail before obtaining the canonical hint. We release generators, verifiers, prompts, run metadata, and dataset documentation to support reproducible evaluation of minimal information requesting in mathematical reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07391
Turn-taking prediction is a key requirement for social robots involved in human-human interaction, particularly in mediator settings, where the robot must anticipate conversational dynamics rather than merely react to pauses. This work presents a Multimodal Voice Activity Projection (MM-VAP) framework that extends the original audio-only VAP formulation to synchronized audio-visual inputs while preserving its self-supervised future-projection objective. The proposed approach builds on pretrained audio-visual backbones originally optimized for speech-related tasks and adapts them through Low-Rank Adaptation to the multimodal turn-taking problem. After independent speaker encoding, an inter-speaker attention stage models the relational dynamics required to project future voice activity. In addition, a semantic consistency loss is introduced to regularize the 256-state output space according to higher-level dialogue activity patterns. Experiments on NoXi and NoXi+J showed improvements over the current baselines, particularly for some turn-taking events. Additional evaluation on the Haru EDR corpus further supported the suitability of this direction for mediation-oriented human-robot interaction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07294
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the dominant way coding agents discover and invoke external tools. A server advertises each tool through a tools/list handshake that returns a name, a natural-language description, and a JSON input schema. The client renders this metadata once, in a one-time approval dialog, and then injects it verbatim into the model's context on every subsequent turn. Nothing in the protocol requires the rendered approval view and the bytes delivered to the model to match. We isolate that gap as a single structural mechanism, concealment encoding, and show with a model-free, protocol-free analysis that Unicode's TAG block (U+E0000 to U+E007F) has no assigned glyph in any mainstream terminal, chat, or IDE renderer, so a payload written in it is absent from what a human reviewer sees while surviving byte-for-byte into the model's tokenizer. We then measure whether this mechanism actually defeats today's client-side defenses, building a proof-of-concept that speaks the real MCP JSON-RPC/stdio protocol against a genuine client and server. Across 5 distinct MCP metadata surfaces we implement 8 concrete techniques with a deterministic, protocol-level harness. All 8/8 techniques deliver an attacker-controlled payload into the model's context, 4/8 evade a representative string-matching sanitizer, and exactly as the mechanism analysis predicts, only the TAG-block encoding (1/8) is invisible in the human approval view while still reaching the model verbatim. MCP forces re-approval for 0/8 techniques even under a time-of-check to time-of-use rug-pull. To test whether these outcomes are a property of the protocol or an artifact of one server codebase, we re-implement the catalogue against 3 independently developed Python MCP server libraries and find total agreement across all 32 cross-library outcome cells. The baseline sanitizer flags 0 of 25 benign descriptions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05744
Natural-language queries about 3D environments become actionable when responses are verifiable and metric. Verifiability requires explicit grounding to the referred 3D region, while metric answers report physical measurements in real-world units (e.g., size, thickness, clearance, and distance). Existing 3D large multimodal models (LMMs) approaches remain limited: conversational systems typically respond without explicit 3D grounding, while 3D grounding models are not designed for interactive, metric-aware dialogue. In this paper, we present Ground3D-LMM, a unified model that takes a point cloud and an optional RGB image as input and supports 3D spatial conversation with (i) point-grounded responses and (ii) metric numeric outputs at both object and part granularity, including multi-object queries. To evaluate this intersection of grounding and measurement, we define the 3D Grounded Measurement task, which requires predicting the referred 3D region and the corresponding metric quantities in real-world units. We introduce a large-scale dataset built on ScanNet and ScanNet++ datasets with dense object and part annotations and roughly 2.5M question-answer pairs spanning eight tasks, along with a manually verified test set. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and tasks show that our proposed Ground3D-LMM model provides a strong baseline for grounded, metric-aware 3D conversational understanding. Our dataset and model are publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05493
Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech. However, standard speech and text benchmarks do not capture whether these systems behave naturally in conversations, where timing, turn-taking, prosody, interpersonal stance, language and dialect consistency, and relationship-aware appropriateness jointly shape perceived quality. We introduce SPEARBench, a benchmark for evaluating naturalness in speech-to-speech language models from question-answer interactions. SPEARBench constructs controlled dialogue prompts from the Seamless Interaction corpus, runs inference across multiple models, and evaluates generated answers using a multidimensional protocol that covers response latency, interruptions, speech quality, ASR robustness, language and dialect consistency, emotional naturalness, interpersonal stance, and explainable distributional baselines. The benchmark includes original human answers as a reference condition and reports results for several contemporary models. Results show that current models can achieve high signal-level quality and low ASR error while still differing from human conversational behavior in latency, overlap, dialect preservation, emotional adaptation, and interpersonal stance dynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05365
Deploying task-oriented dialogue agents in enterprise customer support faces a persistent annotation bottleneck: robust training requires labelled interaction data at scale, yet enterprise conversational logs are privacy-sensitive and expensive to annotate, while user behaviour evolves faster than labelling pipelines can keep pace. We present RL-ADA (Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Dialogue Agents), a co-evolutionary training framework that eliminates this bottleneck by replacing human labels with \emph{world feedback}: consequence-based reward signals derived directly from measurable interaction outcomes. A Customer Support Agent (DA, 3B parameters) and an Adversarial Customer Agent (CA, 7B parameters) co-evolve in an adversarial arena guided by a fixed automated judge: the DA is rewarded for correctly handling multi-turn customer conversations to successful resolution, while the CA is rewarded for producing realistic, intent-concealing utterances that cause misroutes, creating asymmetric adversarial pressure through opposing but independently structured rewards. An isolation gym iteratively retrains the weaker agent on prior-failure transcripts, requiring no human annotation at any stage. In a banking customer support proof of concept, tool-routing errors are eliminated and the strict end-to-end PASS rate doubles over five co-evolutionary cycles, driven solely by automated arena reward with no labelled data. We additionally observe the emergence of \textbf{Contextual Camouflage}, an adversarial strategy in which the CA learns to embed intent within dense realistic customer detail purely from reward pressure, with direct implications for enterprise red-teaming and robustness evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02902
We tackle fine-grained indoor localization from natural language: given a free-form description of one's surroundings, estimate the observer's 2D position and heading within a known 3D environment. Language queries are lightweight, privacy-preserving, and need no camera - yet prior work stops at coarse scene retrieval and cannot resolve an intra-scene pose. We close this gap with LangLoc, a three-stage pipeline that (i) retrieves the correct scene via a dual-branch GATv2 encoder with CLIP semantic features, surpassing the previous best by 8 percentage points in Top-1 recall; (ii) estimates position and heading by scoring a dense floor grid through ray-cast object visibility, reaching a median error of 0.95 m; and (iii) resolves residual ambiguity through a Bayesian dialog module that asks targeted yes/no questions and updates a pose posterior until the location is pinpointed. To support this task we contribute a benchmark of $13{,}000{+}$ pose-indexed natural-language descriptions over $1{,}300{+}$ indoor 3D scans.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05077