A Taxonomy of Conceptual Alignment in Human-Robot Dialogue

We introduce Rationalize, a role-pair framework for shared semantic reasoning between humans and AI models in data-driven sensemaking. Building on ideas in human-machine teaming and critical thinking, we conceptualize human-AI interaction as a series of complementary role pairs (Explorer-Guide, Investigator-Informant, Teacher-Student, Judge-Advocate) operating in a shared reasoning space. In this space, human analysts and AI models (such as LLMs) make purposes, questions, assumptions, evidence, inferences, and implications explicit, facilitating alignment not only at the output level but at the level of rationalization of intent and action by each side. We relate these role pairs to the bidirectional human-AI alignment framework, illustrating how "aligning AI to humans" and "aligning humans to AI" differ by role, and sketch a collaborative research agenda for alignment design and assessment using element-level and role-specific approaches.

We present a conceptual framework for analyzing dialogue in collaborative problem-solving contexts, with an emphasis on the emerging dynamics of human-AI and multi-agent collaboration. As intelligent systems become active agents capable of autonomous reasoning and strategic cooperation, understanding the dialogic interaction during collaborative problem solving is increasingly important for optimizing and evaluating such partnerships. Our framework addresses key limitations in current analytical approaches through a hierarchical two-layer coding scheme that integrates cognitive and non-cognitive problem solving with metacognitive regulatory mechanisms. We demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability across nine datasets spanning multiple domains, and provide insights into how humans and agents coordinate their knowledge, skills, and efforts to solve complex problems, showing in particular that metacognitive regulation can be an essential discriminator of deeper collaboration.

Effective collaboration between embodied agents requires more than acting in a shared environment; it demands communication grounded in each agent's evolving understanding of the world. When agents can only partially observe their surroundings, coordination without communication is provably hard, but communication can, in principle, bridge this gap by allowing agents to share observations and align their world models. In this work, we examine whether LLM-based embodied agents actually realize the ability to communicate. We extend PARTNR, a benchmark for collaborative household robotics, with a natural-language dialogue channel that enables two agents with partial observability to communicate during task execution. To evaluate whether dialogue leads to genuine world-model alignment rather than superficial coordination, we propose a framework for measuring world-model alignment defined over per-agent world graphs: observation convergence (do private world models align over time?), information novelty (do messages convey what the partner lacks?), and belief-sensitive messaging (do agents model what their partner knows?). Our experiments across three LLMs reveal that dialogue reduces action conflicts 40 to 83 percentage points but degrades task success relative to silent coordination. Using our metrics, we characterize the gap between superficial coordination and genuine world-model alignment, and identify where current models fall on this spectrum. Project Website: https://uiuc-conversational-ai-lab.github.io/partnr-dial-wmd/