From Propositional to Perceptual Asymmetry: Extending FPO to Asymmetric Partial Information Dialogue
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Frictive Policy Optimization (FPO; Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy, 2025) treats friction in collaborative dialogue -misalignment, misunderstanding, repair -as an epistemic signal essential to common-ground construction, rather than noise to be minimized.However, FPO and its implementations assume shared perceptual contexts, where friction arises from differently interpreted propositions over the same scene, which we define as propositional asymmetry.We extend FPO to perceptual asymmetry, where participants hold asymmetric partial information and the same referring expression yields different denotations depending on whose information state grounds the reference.We evaluate this through crosscorpora analysis and LLM probing on referentially asymmetric dialogue tasks, primarily the HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991).We find that FPO's friction functional is empirically valid only when evaluated from within each participant's information horizon: different landmark configurations produce qualitatively distinct grounding failure modes, with a small class of ambiguous configurations driving a disproportionate share of misunderstandings through trajectories that appear successful but silently diverge.The LLM probe confirms that having the "right perspective" matters more than having all perspectives: the informed single viewpoint outperforms omniscient access to both participants' contexts.We propose two annotation refinements: subtype decomposition of pending grounding states and accommodation-aware alignment classification.
Authors: Yifan Zhu, Kyeongmin Rim, James Pustejovsky
Institution: Brandeis University
Topic: Speech and dialogue systems
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W7214041997
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