# Phase Transitions in Affective Meaning Divergence: The Hidden Drift Before the Break

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09043/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [Multi-Agent Cooperation and the Emergence of (Natural) Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07182/) (2016)
- [Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00725/) (2021)
- [COSMIC: COmmonSense knowledge for eMotion Identification in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02795/) (2020)
- [Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05345/) (2018)
- [Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01362/) (2019)
- [Language Models Grow Less Humanlike beyond Phase Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18802/) (2025)
- [Affect Control Processes: Intelligent Affective Interaction using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5279/) (2013)
- [A bifurcation threshold for contact-induced language change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12061/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One partner says "Fine" meaning "resolution"; the other hears "surrender." The word is shared; the affective uptake is not. We formalize this as affective meaning divergence (AMD), the total-variation distance between interlocutors' anchor-conditioned affect distributions. Building on speech-act theory, common-ground accumulation, and entropy-regularized game theory, we derive a logit best-response map whose dynamics undergo a saddle-node bifurcation: when βα > 4, a monotone increase in AMD-driven load produces an abrupt, hysteretic collapse of repair coordination. On Conversations Gone Awry (CGA-Wiki; N = 652), derailing conversations exhibit critical-slowing-down (CSD) signatures across multiple levels: lexical divergence variance (p < 0.001, d = 0.36), AMD variance (p = 0.001, d = 0.26), and dialog-act repair variance (p = 0.016, d = 0.20), all significant after correction and stronger than toxicity and sentiment baselines. AMD provides a distinct temporal signature, with retrospectively measured variance peaking at the bifurcation point while toxicity variance peaks earlier, and is the only indicator grounded in the theoretical framework. Boundary-condition analysis on CGA-CMV (N = 1,169) yields mixed but directionally consistent evidence.