Rolling With Resistance: Preference-Optimized LLM Counselors Can Trade Goal Persistence for Relational Attunement in Motivational Interviewing
In Motivational Interviewing (MI), a client's sustain talk (arguments for the status quo) calls for the counselor to roll with resistance, a move that can fail in two opposite ways: capitulation (abandoning the change agenda to preserve rapport) or confrontation (arguing or directing, overriding the client's autonomy). We introduce a two-axis evaluation of counselor responses, anchored in the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) code, Goal Persistence (GP) and Relational Attunement (RA), yielding a four-quadrant framing in which rolling with resistance is high on both, and we ask whether penalizing one failure through preference optimization teaches rolling with resistance...
| Authors | Weiying Chen, Junlong Shen, Zhexuan Tang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 July 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.