Steering Follows Geometry, Not Labels: Emotion Directions in a Full-Duplex Speech Model
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2610.08887 (cs)
[Submitted on 6 Oct 2026]
Title:Steering Follows Geometry, Not Labels: Emotion Directions in a Full-Duplex Speech Model
Authors:Pulak Kuli
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Abstract:Full-duplex voice agents need to modulate emotion and delivery during real-time conversations, when de-escalating a complaint, carrying urgency in dispatch, softening a clinical result. Emotion and delivery control is well studied for TTS and turn based models through prompt-conditioned synthesis, reference-conditioned synthesis and activation steering; PersonaPlex controls identity in a duplex model but not affect.
We study emotion steering in Moshi, a fully open sourced full-duplex speech language model, across four emotions, using mean-difference activation steering, which costs only a few vector additions per frame and no retraining.
We show that emotion is linearly decodable from Moshi's residual stream, but activation steering is only partially achievable, and unevenly so; as happy, angry and surprise steer towards a shared direction while sad is distinctly steerable. We also show that the shared component across the three emotions cannot simply be projected away from all the emotions equally.
| Comments: | Accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Real-Time Conversational Agents (RTCA), Sydney. OpenReview: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Sound (cs.SD) |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7; I.2.6 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.08887 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.08887v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08887
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
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View a PDF of the paper titled Steering Follows Geometry, Not Labels: Emotion Directions in a Full-Duplex Speech Model, by Pulak Kuli
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