CounselPlex: A Stressor-Aware Full-Duplex Counseling Model

Overview & Synopsis

Full-duplex speech models can listen and speak at the same time, enabling natural, low-latency interaction. In counseling, however, these models often focus on the latest utterance and lose track of the seeker's underlying problem. We call this failure Stressor Blindness. We propose CounselPlex, a stressor-aware full-duplex framework that uses two operations. CounselPlex updates a short stressor state during seeker silence and injects this state into positions while listening. We also introduce RoPE Position Shift Augmentation (RPSA), which broadens positional coverage during training and improves performance at longer turn depths in our evaluation. LLM-judge evaluations show improved counseling quality and stressor grounding over strong baselines.