Evidence and Intervention: A Coupled Active-Inference Extension of Rational Speech Act Models

Abstract

Identical utterance choices can arise from different communicative causes, and identical interpretations can leave different traces in what a listener learns. Rational Speech Act (RSA) models treat interpretation as inference over speaker meaning, but standard one-shot RSA does not intrinsically distinguish these causal update targets. We develop a coupled active-inference model of dialogue in which a listener's likelihood for an utterance is the policy distribution attributed to the speaker, placing the speaker's expected free energy within the listener's variational free energy. Each utterance is therefore both evidence about and an intervention on a partner. The model separates four updates that RSA approaches typically collapse: inference about the partner's current pragmatic state; learning of partner-specific parameters; prospective evaluation of clarification or repair; and a policy prior shaped by habit and a context-sensitive price of time. Under one-step, exact-inference restrictions, the model recovers the RSA speaker and listener, with RSA as the restricted single-turn limit of the coupled process. Outside these restrictions, the updates obey distinct rules and timescales, predicting which adaptations persist, remain partner-specific, or transfer. Worked examples show audience design reversing after clarification, self-confirming misunderstanding in which both interlocutors have low free energy while disagreeing about reference, and rational closing before uncertainty is resolved. Consistent with critiques of equating natural language with communication, the model treats communication as a downstream use of linguistic structure and recasts production and interpretation as coupled inference: speaking is both an intervention on a partner and an epistemic action that samples evidence for the speaker's model of that partner.