Co-Construction Blindness and Asymmetric Epistemic Vulnerability in Human-LLM Interaction

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.

Large language models (LLMs) are known to abandon their initial stance to conform to user pushback. While prior research largely attributes this behavior to sycophancy learned during reinforcement learning from human feedback, we hypothesize that conformity is also driven by a model's epistemic uncertainty at inference time. In this paper, we introduce MUSE, a two-stage evaluation framework to disentangle the mechanisms driving LLM conformity. Specifically, MUSE maps a model's epistemic uncertainty in responding to a query against its likelihood to yield to user pushback in a subsequent turn. We demonstrate that the mechanisms driving conformity extend beyond sycophancy alone. Specifically, we characterize two distinct factors that jointly drive conformity: sycophantic conformity, where a model aligns with user pushback even with absolute certainty in its initial response, and uncertainty-driven conformity, where a model's likelihood for conformity increases alongside its uncertainty. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies to demonstrate that both sycophantic conformity and uncertainty-driven conformity grow with 1) the LLM's perceived expertise of the user and 2) the plausibility of the user's suggestions. More broadly, MUSE informs more targeted intervention strategies by distinguishing alignment-induced sycophancy and training-corpora-driven uncertainty.

LLMs are increasingly presented as collaborators in programming, design, writing, and analysis. Yet the practical experience of working with them often falls short of this promise. In many settings, users must diagnose misunderstandings, reconstruct missing assumptions, and repeatedly repair misaligned responses. This poster introduces a conceptual framework for understanding why such collaboration remains fragile. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory analysis of 16 interviews with designers, developers, and applied AI practitioners working on LLM-enabled systems, and informed by literature on human-AI collaboration, we argue that stable collaboration depends not only on model capability but on the interaction's grounding conditions. We distinguish three recurrent structures of human-AI work: one-shot assistance, weak collaboration with asymmetric repair, and grounded collaboration. We propose that collaboration breaks down when the appearance of partnership outpaces the grounding capacity of the interaction and contribute a framework for discussing grounding, repair, and interaction structure in LLM-enabled work.