Paper Detail

Spoken Function Calling: A New Perspective on Spoken Language Understanding for Large Audio Language Models

Yuezhang Peng, Yuxin Liu, Changfeng Gao, Zhifu Gao, Xiangang Li, Xie Chen

arxiv Score 12.2

Published 2026-08-05 · First seen 2026-08-06

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is the core component of task-oriented dialogue systems and a pivotal link in achieving seamless human-agent interaction. While traditional SLU can effectively extract user semantics for closed-set tasks after in-domain supervised fine-tuning, it faces significant challenges in leveraging in-context learning for open-domain tasks due to its ambiguous rule definitions. This work proposes Spoken Function Calling (SFC), a novel semantic understanding perspective that optimizes semantic understanding with structured rule definitions, to evolve beyond traditional closed-set SLU. Specifically, we curate and extend a suite of spoken functions based on traditional SLU datasets, construct a multi-agent system to synthesize the SFC-Bench dataset, evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), and enhance the SFC capabilities of LALMs through post-training. Experiments demonstrate that SFC outperforms traditional SLU, substantially enhancing the semantic extraction accuracy for LLMs and LALMs.

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BibTeX

@article{peng2026spoken,
  title = {Spoken Function Calling: A New Perspective on Spoken Language Understanding for Large Audio Language Models},
  author = {Yuezhang Peng and Yuxin Liu and Changfeng Gao and Zhifu Gao and Xiangang Li and Xie Chen},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is the core component of task-oriented dialogue systems and a pivotal link in achieving seamless human-agent interaction. While traditional SLU can effectively extract user semantics for closed-set tasks after in-domain supervised fine-tuning, it faces significant challenges in leveraging in-context learning for open-domain tasks due to its ambiguous rule definitions. This work proposes Spoken Function Calling (SFC), a novel semantic understanding perspective },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05126},
  keywords = {cs.CL, cs.MM},
  eprint = {2608.05126},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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