Paper Detail

Multimodal Voice Activity Projection for Turn-Taking in Social Robots with Voice-Activity-Related Pretrained Encoders

Antonio Cano, Guillermo Pérez, Luis Merino, Randy Gomez

arxiv Score 9.3

Published 2026-07-08 · First seen 2026-07-10

General AI

Abstract

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.

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BibTeX

@article{cano2026multimodal,
  title = {Multimodal Voice Activity Projection for Turn-Taking in Social Robots with Voice-Activity-Related Pretrained Encoders},
  author = {Antonio Cano and Guillermo Pérez and Luis Merino and Randy Gomez},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {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},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07294},
  keywords = {cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CL},
  eprint = {2607.07294},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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