The ICASSP 2026 HumDial Challenge: Benchmarking Human-like Spoken Dialogue Systems in the LLM Era

Abstract: Driven by the rapid advancement of LLMs, particularly Audio-LLMs and Omni-models, spoken dialogue systems have evolved significantly, progressively narrowing the gap between human-machine and human-human interactions. Achieving truly human-like'' communication necessitates a dual capability: emotional intelligence to perceive and resonate with users' emotional states, and robust interaction mechanisms to navigate the dynamic, natural flow of conversation, such as real-time turn-taking. Therefore, we launched the first Human-like Spoken Dialogue Systems Challenge (HumDial) at ICASSP 2026 to benchmark these dual capabilities. Anchored by a sizable dataset derived from authentic human conversations, this initiative establishes a fair evaluation platform across two tracks: (1) Emotional Intelligence, targeting long-term emotion understanding and empathetic generation; and (2) Full-Duplex Interaction, systematically evaluating real-time decision-making under listening-while-speaking'' conditions. This paper summarizes the dataset, track configurations, and the final results.