RelayS2S: A Dual-Path Speculative Generation for Real-Time Dialogue

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2603.23346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-time spoken dialogue systems face a fundamental tension between latency and response quality. End-to-end speech-to-speech (S2S) models respond immediately and naturally handle turn-taking, backchanneling, and interruption, but produce semantically weaker outputs. Cascaded pipelines (ASR -> LLM) deliver stronger responses at the cost of latency that grows with model size. We present RelayS2S, a hybrid architecture that runs two paths in parallel upon turn detection. The fast path - a duplex S2S model - speculatively drafts a short response prefix that is streamed immediately to TTS for low-latency response onset, while continuing to monitor live audio events. The slow path - a cascaded ASR -> LLM pipeline - generates a higher-quality