Rolling With Resistance: Preference-Optimized LLM Counselors Can Trade Goal Persistence for Relational Attunement in Motivational Interviewing

arXiv:2607.28814 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-07-30 · Read on arXiv

Weiying Chen, Junlong Shen, Zhexuan Tang

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-07-30

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Goal Persistence — 32× in this paper
• Relational Attunement — 14× in this paper
• Generator — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 6× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 5× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Ablation — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• In Motivational Interviewing — 4× in this paper
• Regularization — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Trace — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Motivational Interviewing (MI) — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity — 3× in this paper
• Sycophancy — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Fidelity — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• LoRA Adapters — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Abundance — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Evaluation Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics — 1× in this paper
• Harness — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• In International Conference on Learning Representations — 1× in this paper
• In International Conference on Machine Learning — 1× in this paper
• LLM judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
• Pairwise Comparisons — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Pareto Frontier — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Scaling Laws — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformers — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
• A Survey of Direct Preference Optimization

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