EchoChat recasts empathetic spoken dialogue as a three-stage perception–mental-state–response pipeline, lifting EchoEval perception from 6.96 to 8.23 and reasoning from 6.61 to 8.43
The work introduces EchoChat, which reformulates empathetic spoken dialogue as a structured cognitive reasoning process spanning perception, mental-state reasoning, and response generation, supported by the EchoDialogue-400K dataset of 400K single-turn samples plus 4K multi-turn sessions, Acoustic-Anchored Attention, and a stage-aware RL objective with Step-Decomposed Credit Assignment, together with the 1K-instance expert-annotated EchoEval benchmark; experiments report gains over 12 compared models with perception 8.23, reasoning 8.43, and response 9.26, and an average Spearman correlation of 0.83 between LLM-based scores and human judgments.