Abstract
Recent AI alignment work often frames alignment as a pre-deployment optimization problem: collect human feedback, learn preferences or principles, finetune the model, and deploy an aligned system. This framing has produced major progress, but it under-specifies what happens once AI systems act as agents on users' behalf in situated, long-term, and social contexts. This position paper reframes human-agent alignment as an ongoing interaction design problem. We propose SPEAR, five pillars of interactive alignment: Specification (how people express intent and establish shared understanding), Process (how agents decide when to act, ask, defer, or pause), Evaluation (how people judge whether agents succeeded), Adaptation (how agents adapt to users over repeated use), and Recalibration (how people adapt their trust, expectations, and behavior in response to agents).
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Publication details
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Long, T., & Chilton, L. B. (2026). SPEAR: Five Principles for Interactive Human-Agent Alignment. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/spear-five-principles-for-interactive-human-agent-alignment
MLA 9
Long, Tao, and Lydia B. Chilton. "SPEAR: Five Principles for Interactive Human-Agent Alignment." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/spear-five-principles-for-interactive-human-agent-alignment.
Chicago (author–date)
Long, Tao, and Lydia B. Chilton. 2026. "SPEAR: Five Principles for Interactive Human-Agent Alignment." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/spear-five-principles-for-interactive-human-agent-alignment.
Harvard
Long, T. and Chilton, L. B. (2026) 'SPEAR: Five Principles for Interactive Human-Agent Alignment', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/spear-five-principles-for-interactive-human-agent-alignment.
Vancouver
Long T, Chilton LB. SPEAR: Five Principles for Interactive Human-Agent Alignment. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/spear-five-principles-for-interactive-human-agent-alignment
IEEE
T. Long, and L. B. Chilton, "SPEAR: Five Principles for Interactive Human-Agent Alignment," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/spear-five-principles-for-interactive-human-agent-alignment.