Empathy as Predictive Misalignment Tolerance: A Co-Regulation Framework and the Regime Structure of Dialogue Repair
A new arXiv preprint reframes empathy in dialogue systems as predictive misalignment tolerance, rather than emotional resonance. The authors introduce Interpretive Error Tolerance (IET), a dynamic-threshold heuristic, and use computational probes to reveal that dialogue repair operates in regime-dependent ways: it trades off discriminative fidelity for gist preservation depending on noise levels. The findings suggest that empathic AI should focus on managing interpretive distance over time, rather than eliminating divergence entirely.
Why it matters: This work proposes a novel, temporally dynamic model of empathy for AI, challenging prevailing approaches and offering new directions for dialogue system design.
Full story at: arXiv Computation and Language ↗