arXiv subjects

Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Publications and source records attributed to Nikhil Krishnaswamy.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Flout at Your Own Risk: LLMs Struggle with Pragmatic Cooperativity Under Epistemic Asymmetry

Fruitful collaborations rely on cooperative communications, including of contextual cues to incorporate into reasoning. The increasing use of LLMs in collaborative and agentic pipelines raises questions about the extent to which they exhibit these pragmatic capabilities, especially in scenarios where they may not have access to the same information as their collaborators. In this paper, we perform a novel investigation into the pragmatic reasoning capabilities of LLMs in a multi-party collaborative task under partial information conditions. We formalize a notion of collaborative epistemic asymmetry that explicitly connects objective task success to Grice's cooperative principle and empirically assess various LLMs' abilities to act cooperatively as both speakers and listeners, including both prompting and post-training strategies. Our results show that while LLMs exhibit certain pragmatic capabilities in collaborative settings, and these can be elicited through prompting and post-training, they still face challenges in pragmatic communication with incomplete information, and that certain failure modes do correlate with floutings of Grice's maxims that go unrecognized.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

ECHO: Learning Epistemically Adaptive Language Agents with Turn-Level Credit

What does it mean for a language agent to be adaptive? Effective multi-turn agents must decide what information to seek, how to use new evidence, and when they are certain enough to act. We introduce Epistemic Decision Processes (EDPs), a belief-state formulation of multi-turn information seeking in which actions produce external observations that update the agent's posterior over a latent task variable. EDPs make epistemic adaptivity explicit: good policies choose actions that are useful under the current belief, not merely those that correlate with eventual success. We prove that belief-agnostic policies can suffer errors that compound exponentially over the horizon, and that aggregate trajectory returns can fail to identify the per-turn Bayesian advantage needed for epistemic credit. We then introduce ECHO (Epistemic Credit for History-Conditioned Optimization), a practical clipped policy-gradient objective that assigns turn-level credit using posterior-sensitive rewards. In the Clue Selector Game, a novel controlled evidence-seeking benchmark, we show that ECHO substantially improves resolution, information gain, and efficiency over trajectory-level GRPO, and matches or exceeds frontier baselines on epistemic metrics such as grounding, recovery, and calibration while producing almost no visible reasoning text.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Owen-Shapley Policy Optimization: A Principled RL Algorithm for Generative Search LLMs

Large language models are increasingly trained via reinforcement learning for personalized recommendation tasks, but standard methods like GRPO rely on sparse, sequence-level rewards. These obscure which tokens actually contribute to high-quality outputs, creating a credit assignment gap. This gap is especially problematic when models must infer latent user intent from under-specified language without ground truth labels, which is a reasoning pattern rarely seen during pretraining but commonly required in deployment. We introduce Owen-Shapley Policy Optimization (OSPO), a framework that redistributes sequence-level advantages based on tokens' marginal contributions to outcomes. OSPO transforms task feedback into potential-based reward shaping via Shapley-Owen attributions to assign segment-level credit while preserving the optimal policy, all without parametric value models. By forming coalitions of semantically coherent units (e.g., phrases describing product attributes or sentences capturing preferences), OSPO identifies which response parts drive performance. Experiments on Amazon ESCI and H&M Fashion datasets including controlled generation tasks show consistent gains over baselines and notable test-time robustness to out-of-distribution retrievers unseen during training.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CRAFT: Grounded Multi-Agent Coordination Under Partial Information

We introduce CRAFT, a multi-agent benchmark for evaluating pragmatic communication in large language models under strict partial information. In this setting, multiple agents with complementary but incomplete views must coordinate through natural language to construct a shared 3D structure that no single agent can fully observe. We formalize this problem as a multi-sender Bounded Pragmatic Speaker problem and provide a diagnostic framework that decomposes failures into spatial grounding, belief modeling and pragmatic communication errors, including a taxonomy of behavioral failure profiles in both frontier and open-weight models. Across a diverse set of models, including 8 open-weight and 7 frontier including reasoning models, we find that stronger reasoning ability does not reliably translate to better coordination: smaller open-weight models often match or outperform frontier systems, and improved individual communication does not guarantee successful collaboration. These results suggest that multi-agent coordination remains a fundamentally unsolved challenge for current language models. Our code can be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/CRAFT

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Frictive Policy Optimization for LLMs: Epistemic Intervention, Risk-Sensitive Control, and Reflective Alignment

We propose Frictive Policy Optimization (FPO), a framework for learning language model policies that regulate not only what to say, but when and how to intervene in order to manage epistemic and normative risk. Unlike standard alignment methods that optimize surface-level preference or task utility, FPO treats clarification, verification, challenge, redirection, and refusal as explicit control actions whose purpose is to shape the evolution of belief, commitment, and uncertainty over time. We formalize alignment as a risk-sensitive epistemic control problem in which intervention decisions are selected based on their expected effect on downstream epistemic quality rather than on immediate reward alone. We introduce a compact taxonomy of frictive interventions, a structured friction functional that operationalizes multiple alignment failure modes, and a unified family of FPO methods spanning reward shaping, preference pairing, group-relative ranking, and risk-conditioned trust regions. We further propose an evaluation framework that measures epistemic competence directly through clarification behavior, calibration, contradiction repair, refusal proportionality, and information efficiency. Together, these results provide a formal and algorithmic foundation for learning agents that are aligned not only in outcome, but in epistemic conduct.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Why MLLMs Struggle to Determine Object Orientations

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with tasks that require reasoning about 2D object orientation in images, as documented in prior work. Tong et al. and Nichols et al. hypothesize that these failures originate in the visual encoder, since commonly used encoders such as CLIP and SigLIP are trained for image-text semantic alignment rather than geometric reasoning. We design a controlled empirical protocol to test this claim by measuring whether rotations can be recovered from encoder representations. In particular, we examine SigLIP and ViT features from LLaVA OneVision and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct models, respectively, using full images, and examine CLIP representations in LLaVA 1.5 and 1.6 using rotated foreground patches against natural background images. Our null hypothesis is that orientation information is not preserved in the encoder embeddings and we test this by training linear regressors to predict object orientation from encoded features. Contrary to the hypothesis, we find that orientation information is recoverable from encoder representations: simple linear models accurately predict object orientations from embeddings. This contradicts the assumption that MLLM orientation failures originate in the visual encoder. Having rejected the accepted hypothesis that MLLMs struggle with 2D orientation tasks because of visual encoder limitations, we still don't know why they fail. Although a full explanation is beyond the scope of this paper, we show that although present, orientation information is spread diffusely across tens of thousands of features. This may or may not be while MLLMs fail to exploit the available orientation information.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Distributed Partial Information Puzzles: Examining Common Ground Construction Under Epistemic Asymmetry

Establishing common ground, a shared set of beliefs and mutually recognized facts, is fundamental to collaboration, yet remains a challenge for current AI systems, especially in multimodal, multiparty settings, where the collaborators bring different information to the table. We introduce the Distributed Partial Information Puzzle (DPIP), a collaborative construction task that elicits rich multimodal communication under epistemic asymmetry. We present a multimodal dataset of these interactions, annotated and temporally aligned across speech, gesture, and action modalities to support reasoning over propositional content and belief dynamics. We then evaluate two paradigms for modeling common ground (CG): (1) state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), prompted to infer shared beliefs from multimodal updates, and (2) an axiomatic pipeline grounded in Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) that incrementally performs the same task. Results on the annotated DPIP data indicate that it poses a challenge to modern LLMs' abilities to track both task progression and belief state.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Collaborate, Deliberate, Evaluate: How LLM Alignment Affects Coordinated Multi-Agent Outcomes

As Large Language Models (LLMs) get integrated into diverse workflows, they are increasingly being regarded as "collaborators" with humans, and required to work in coordination with other AI systems. If such AI collaborators are to reliably coordinate their actions and behaviors with humans or other AIs, their properties and behaviors over multi-turn interactions must be known and predictable. This paper examines how different alignment methods affect LLM agents' effectiveness as partners in multi-turn, multi-party collaborations. We study this question through the lens of intervention agents that insert themselves into group dialogues not to provide answers, but to encourage the collaborative group to slow down and reflect upon their reasoning for deliberative decision-making. Common alignment techniques are typically developed under simplified single-user settings and assume the optimality of the underlying token MDP. Using the theoretical lens of the modified-action MDP, we show how they do not account for the dynamics of long-horizon multi-party interactions. We present a novel roleplay simulation methodology, where we align LLMs according to different methods and then deploy them in collaborative task dialogues to quantify how interventions affect the trajectory of group collaboration, belief alignment, and coordination. Our results show that an intervention agent that is robust to action modification significantly outperforms common alignment baselines in supporting correct task outcomes.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Learning "Partner-Aware" Collaborators in Multi-Party Collaboration

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in agentic settings where they act as collaborators with humans. Therefore, it is increasingly important to be able to evaluate their abilities to collaborate effectively in multi-turn, multi-party tasks. In this paper, we build on the AI alignment and safe interruptibility literature to offer novel theoretical insights on collaborative behavior between LLM-driven collaborator agents and an intervention agent. Our goal is to learn an ideal partner-aware collaborator that increases the group's common-ground (CG) alignment on task-relevant propositions-by intelligently collecting information provided in interventions by a partner agent. We show how LLM agents trained using standard RLHF and related approaches are naturally inclined to ignore possibly well-meaning interventions, which makes increasing group common ground non-trivial in this setting. We employ a two-player Modified-Action MDP to examine this suboptimal behavior of standard AI agents, and propose Interruptible Collaborative Roleplayer (ICR)-a novel partner-aware learning algorithm to train CG-optimal collaborators. Experiments on multiple collaborative task environments show that ICR, on average, is more capable of promoting successful CG convergence and exploring more diverse solutions in such tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

On the Role of Domain Experts in Creating Effective Tutoring Systems

The role that highly curated knowledge, provided by domain experts, could play in creating effective tutoring systems is often overlooked within the AI for education community. In this paper, we highlight this topic by discussing two ways such highly curated expert knowledge could help in creating novel educational systems. First, we will look at how one could use explainable AI (XAI) techniques to automatically create lessons. Most existing XAI methods are primarily aimed at debugging AI systems. However, we will discuss how one could use expert specified rules about solving specific problems along with novel XAI techniques to automatically generate lessons that could be provided to learners. Secondly, we will see how an expert specified curriculum for learning a target concept can help develop adaptive tutoring systems, that can not only provide a better learning experience, but could also allow us to use more efficient algorithms to create these systems. Finally, we will highlight the importance of such methods using a case study of creating a tutoring system for pollinator identification, where such knowledge could easily be elicited from experts.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

The Impact of Background Speech on Interruption Detection in Collaborative Groups

Interruption plays a crucial role in collaborative learning, shaping group interactions and influencing knowledge construction. AI-driven support can assist teachers in monitoring these interactions. However, most previous work on interruption detection and interpretation has been conducted in single-conversation environments with relatively clean audio. AI agents deployed in classrooms for collaborative learning within small groups will need to contend with multiple concurrent conversations -- in this context, overlapping speech will be ubiquitous, and interruptions will need to be identified in other ways. In this work, we analyze interruption detection in single-conversation and multi-group dialogue settings. We then create a state-of-the-art method for interruption identification that is robust to overlapping speech, and thus could be deployed in classrooms. Further, our work highlights meaningful linguistic and prosodic information about how interruptions manifest in collaborative group interactions. Our investigation also paves the way for future works to account for the influence of overlapping speech from multiple groups when tracking group dialog.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Dynamic Epistemic Friction in Dialogue

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.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Frictional Agent Alignment Framework: Slow Down and Don't Break Things

AI support of collaborative interactions entails mediating potential misalignment between interlocutor beliefs. Common preference alignment methods like DPO excel in static settings, but struggle in dynamic collaborative tasks where the explicit signals of interlocutor beliefs are sparse and skewed. We propose the Frictional Agent Alignment Framework (FAAF), to generate precise, context-aware "friction" that prompts for deliberation and re-examination of existing evidence. FAAF's two-player objective decouples from data skew: a frictive-state policy identifies belief misalignments, while an intervention policy crafts collaborator-preferred responses. We derive an analytical solution to this objective, enabling training a single policy via a simple supervised loss. Experiments on three benchmarks show FAAF outperforms competitors in producing concise, interpretable friction and in OOD generalization. By aligning LLMs to act as adaptive "thought partners" -- not passive responders -- FAAF advances scalable, dynamic human-AI collaboration. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/FAAF_ACL.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

TRACE: Real-Time Multimodal Common Ground Tracking in Situated Collaborative Dialogues

We present TRACE, a novel system for live *common ground* tracking in situated collaborative tasks. With a focus on fast, real-time performance, TRACE tracks the speech, actions, gestures, and visual attention of participants, uses these multimodal inputs to determine the set of task-relevant propositions that have been raised as the dialogue progresses, and tracks the group's epistemic position and beliefs toward them as the task unfolds. Amid increased interest in AI systems that can mediate collaborations, TRACE represents an important step forward for agents that can engage with multiparty, multimodal discourse.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Simultaneous Reward Distillation and Preference Learning: Get You a Language Model Who Can Do Both

Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems including model drift and reward overfitting. Although popular due to its simplicity, DPO and similar direct alignment methods which rely heavily on the Bradley-Terry-based pairwise preference formulation can still lead to degenerate policies when challenged by non-deterministic or noisy preference labels, for example human scoring of two candidate outputs with low confidence. This paper introduces DRDO (Direct Reward Distillation and policy-Optimization), which simultaneously models rewards and preferences to avoid such degeneracy. DRDO directly mimics rewards assigned by an oracle while learning human preferences with a novel preference likelihood formulation. Results on the Ultrafeedback and TL;DR datasets demonstrate that DRDO-trained policies surpass methods such as DPO and e-DPO in terms of expected rewards and are more robust, on average, to noisy preference signals as well as out-of-distribution (OOD) settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Speech Is Not Enough: Interpreting Nonverbal Indicators of Common Knowledge and Engagement

Our goal is to develop an AI Partner that can provide support for group problem solving and social dynamics. In multi-party working group environments, multimodal analytics is crucial for identifying non-verbal interactions of group members. In conjunction with their verbal participation, this creates an holistic understanding of collaboration and engagement that provides necessary context for the AI Partner. In this demo, we illustrate our present capabilities at detecting and tracking nonverbal behavior in student task-oriented interactions in the classroom, and the implications for tracking common ground and engagement.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Bidirectional Human-AI Learning in Real-Time Disoriented Balancing

We present a real-time system that enables bidirectional human-AI learning and teaching in a balancing task that is a realistic analogue of disorientation during piloting and spaceflight. A human subject and autonomous AI model of choice guide each other in maintaining balance using a visual inverted pendulum (VIP) display. We show how AI assistance changes human performance and vice versa.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Any Other Thoughts, Hedgehog? Linking Deliberation Chains in Collaborative Dialogues

Question-asking in collaborative dialogue has long been established as key to knowledge construction, both in internal and collaborative problem solving. In this work, we examine probing questions in collaborative dialogues: questions that explicitly elicit responses from the speaker's interlocutors. Specifically, we focus on modeling the causal relations that lead directly from utterances earlier in the dialogue to the emergence of the probing question. We model these relations using a novel graph-based framework of deliberation chains, and reframe the problem of constructing such chains as a coreference-style clustering problem. Our framework jointly models probing and causal utterances and the links between them, and we evaluate on two challenging collaborative task datasets: the Weights Task and DeliData. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretically-grounded approach compared to both baselines and stronger coreference approaches, and establish a standard of performance in this novel task.

cs.CL↗