Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2608.19515

Hear2Act: Benchmarking When Prosody Should Change What an Assistant Does

Xinyi Liu·Hooshang Nayyeri·Dilek Hakkani-Tur·Emine Yilmaz·Joo-Kyung Kim·Yifei Zhang·Charith Peris·Hari Thadakamalla
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions. We introduce Hear2Act, a unified evaluation protocol for text and spoken assistants with 480 persona-grounded scenarios, hidden user concerns, and objectively verifiable outcomes. For each scenario, we keep the task and user needs fixed while varying whether the same concern is conveyed explicitly in words or primarily through prosody, and evaluate decisions under transcript, audio, and concern-state access. Using Hear2Act, we evaluate two audio-capable LLMs. Under Prosody-mediated feedback, adding audio to the transcript changes the average optimal-solution rate only from 14.6% to 15.3%. In contrast, when models infer the concern status from audio, represent it in text, and use it for next-action selection, the rate rises to 39.6%, close to 40.7% with the ground-truth state. This contrast, however, largely disappears under Explicit lexical feedback, where the concern is verbally mentioned in the utterance. Together, these results show that prosody matters when lexical evidence is insufficient, and that audio-capable LLMs can recover information from speech but do not reliably carry it into action without an explicit intermediate representation.

Explore related subjects

cs.CL

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Xinyi Liu, Hooshang Nayyeri, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Emine Yilmaz, Joo-Kyung Kim, Yifei Zhang, Charith Peris, Hari Thadakamalla. 2026-08-21. Hear2Act: Benchmarking When Prosody Should Change What an Assistant Does. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19515

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

DA-Cramming: Enhancing Cost-Effective Language Model Pretraining with Dependency Agreement Integration

Pretraining language models is still a challenge for many researchers due to its substantial computational costs. As such, there is growing interest in developing more affordable pretraining methods. One notable advancement in this area is the Cramming technique (Geiping and Goldstein, 2022), which enables the pretraining of BERT-style language models using just one GPU in a single day. Building on this innovative approach, we introduce the Dependency Agreement Cramming (DA-Cramming), an efficient framework that integrates information about dependency agreements into the pretraining process. Unlike existing methods that leverage similar semantic information during finetuning, our approach represents a pioneering effort focusing on enhancing the foundational language understanding with semantic information during pretraining. We meticulously design a dual-stage pretraining work flow with four dedicated submodels to capture representative dependency agreements at the chunk level, effectively transforming these agreements into embeddings to benefit the pretraining. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods across various tasks.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

BigO(Bench): Can LLMs Generate Code with Controlled Time and Space Complexity?

We introduce BigO(Bench), a novel coding benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of generative language models in understanding and generating code with specified time and space complexities. This benchmark addresses the gap in current evaluations that often overlook the ability of models to comprehend and produce code constrained by computational complexity. BigO(Bench) includes tooling to infer the algorithmic complexity of any Python function from profiling measurements, including human- or LLM-generated solutions. BigO(Bench) also includes of set of 3,105 coding problems and 1,190,250 solutions from Code Contests annotated with inferred (synthetic) time and space complexity labels from the complexity framework, as well as corresponding runtime and memory footprint values for a large set of input sizes. We present results from evaluating multiple state-of-the-art language models on this benchmark, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in handling complexity requirements. In particular, token-space reasoning models are unrivaled in code generation but not in complexity understanding, hinting that they may not generalize well to tasks for which no reward was given at training time.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

UR$^2$: Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge grounding and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for complex reasoning. However, existing attempts to unify these paradigms remain narrow in scope, typically limited to open-domain QA with fixed retrieval settings, which constrains generalization to broader domains. To address this limitation, we propose UR$^2$ (Unified RAG and Reasoning)), a general reinforcement learning framework that dynamically coordinates retrieval and reasoning. UR$^2$ introduces two key designs: a difficulty-aware curriculum that selectively invokes retrieval only for challenging instances, and a hybrid knowledge access strategy that combines domain-specific offline corpora with on-the-fly LLM-generated summaries. Together, these components mitigate the imbalance between retrieval and reasoning and improve robustness to noisy information. Experiments on open-domain QA, MMLU-Pro, medical, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that UR$^2$, built on Qwen-2.5-3/7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, consistently outperforms existing RAG and RL baselines, and achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini on several benchmarks. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/UR2.

cs.CL↗