Dynamic Epistemic Friction in Dialogue

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Main Authors: Obiso, Timothy, Lai, Kenneth, Nath, Abhijnan, Krishnaswamy, Nikhil, Pustejovsky, James
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Obiso, Timothy
Lai, Kenneth
Nath, Abhijnan
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
Pustejovsky, James
author_facet Obiso, Timothy
Lai, Kenneth
Nath, Abhijnan
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
Pustejovsky, James
contents Recent developments in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences have significantly enhanced their utility in human-AI collaborative scenarios. However, such approaches often neglect the critical role of "epistemic friction," or the inherent resistance encountered when updating beliefs in response to new, conflicting, or ambiguous information. In this paper, we define dynamic epistemic friction as the resistance to epistemic integration, characterized by the misalignment between an agent's current belief state and new propositions supported by external evidence. We position this within the framework of Dynamic Epistemic Logic (Van Benthem and Pacuit, 2011), where friction emerges as nontrivial belief-revision during the interaction. We then present analyses from a situated collaborative task that demonstrate how this model of epistemic friction can effectively predict belief updates in dialogues, and we subsequently discuss how the model of belief alignment as a measure of epistemic resistance or friction can naturally be made more sophisticated to accommodate the complexities of real-world dialogue scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10934
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamic Epistemic Friction in Dialogue
Obiso, Timothy
Lai, Kenneth
Nath, Abhijnan
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
Pustejovsky, James
Computation and Language
Recent developments in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences have significantly enhanced their utility in human-AI collaborative scenarios. However, such approaches often neglect the critical role of "epistemic friction," or the inherent resistance encountered when updating beliefs in response to new, conflicting, or ambiguous information. In this paper, we define dynamic epistemic friction as the resistance to epistemic integration, characterized by the misalignment between an agent's current belief state and new propositions supported by external evidence. We position this within the framework of Dynamic Epistemic Logic (Van Benthem and Pacuit, 2011), where friction emerges as nontrivial belief-revision during the interaction. We then present analyses from a situated collaborative task that demonstrate how this model of epistemic friction can effectively predict belief updates in dialogues, and we subsequently discuss how the model of belief alignment as a measure of epistemic resistance or friction can naturally be made more sophisticated to accommodate the complexities of real-world dialogue scenarios.
title Dynamic Epistemic Friction in Dialogue
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10934