# From Propositional to Perceptual Asymmetry: Extending Frictive Policy Optimization to Asymmetric Partial Information Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30973/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [A Natural Language Corpus of Common Grounding under Continuous and Partially-Observable Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03399/) (2019)
- [DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05271/) (2021)
- [Common Ground Tracking in Multimodal Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17284/) (2024)
- [Frictional Agent Alignment Framework: Slow Down and Don't Break Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19428/) (2025)
- [Frictive Policy Optimization for LLMs: Epistemic Intervention, Risk-Sensitive Control, and Reflective Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25136/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Frictive Policy Optimization (FPO; Pustejovsky et al., 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 cross-corpora 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.