Mind the Gap: Theory-of-Mind-Grounded Friction for Epistemic Alignment
Productive dialogue alignment requires distinguishing \emph{surface coordination} (acknowledgments and smooth task progression) from \emph{epistemic alignment} (convergence of belief states); standard preference-based methods typically optimize response-level preferences without explicitly modeling the latter. We operationalize Theory-of-Mind (ToM) inference as a control signal within Frictive Policy Optimization by extracting, at each referring expression, a four-part belief structure: the speaker's intended referent, the addressee's interpretation, and each participant's model of the other's belief. This makes friction mechanically computable from epistemic-state comparisons, capturing ...
| Authors | Yifan Zhu, Kyeongmin Rim, James Pustejovsky |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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