CounselPlex: A Stressor-Aware Full-Duplex Counseling Model

Abstract

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 <PAD> 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.