NoXi

Multimodal Voice Activity Projection framework for turn-taking prediction in social robots

Researchers introduce MM-VAP, a Multimodal Voice Activity Projection framework that extends audio-only turn-taking prediction to synchronized audio-visual inputs for use in social robots acting as conversation mediators. The approach uses pretrained audio-visual backbones adapted via Low-Rank Adaptation, an inter-speaker attention stage, and a semantic consistency loss to regularize the output space. Experiments on the NoXi, NoXi+J, and Haru EDR corpora show improvements over baselines on several turn-taking events. The work targets human-robot interaction scenarios where anticipating conversational dynamics is required rather than simply reacting to pauses.