{"ID":2870153,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12626","arxiv_id":"2509.12626","title":"DoubleAgents: Human-Agent Alignment in a Socially Embedded Workflow","abstract":"Aligning agentic AI with user intent is critical for delegating complex, socially embedded tasks, yet user preferences are often implicit, evolving, and difficult to specify upfront. We present DoubleAgents, a system for human-agent alignment in coordination tasks, grounded in distributed cognition. DoubleAgents integrates three components: (1) a coordination agent that maintains state and proposes plans and actions, (2) a dashboard visualization that makes the agent's reasoning legible for user evaluation, and (3) a policy module that transforms user edits into reusable alignment artifacts, including coordination policies, email templates, and stop hooks, which improve system behavior over time. We evaluate DoubleAgents through a two-day lab study (n=10), three real-world deployments, and a technical evaluation. Participants' comfort in offloading tasks and reliance on DoubleAgents both increased over time, correlating with the three distributed cognition components. Participants still required control at points of uncertainty - edge-case flagging and context-dependent actions. We contribute a distributed cognition approach to human-agent alignment in socially embedded tasks.","short_abstract":"Aligning agentic AI with user intent is critical for delegating complex, socially embedded tasks, yet user preferences are often implicit, evolving, and difficult to specify upfront. We present DoubleAgents, a system for human-agent alignment in coordination tasks, grounded in distributed cognition. DoubleAgents integr...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12626","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12626v3","authors":"[\"Tao Long\",\"Xuanming Zhang\",\"Sitong Wang\",\"Zhou Yu\",\"Lydia B Chilton\"]","published":"2025-09-16T03:43:13Z","proceeding":"cs.HC","tasks":"[\"cs.HC\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.CY\",\"cs.ET\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}