A Motivational Architecture for Conversational AGI

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] A Motivational Architecture for Conversational AGI Anna Mikeda, Ben Goertzel Motivational architectures in cognitive AI have largely been designed for physical agents regulating bodily needs. Conversational agents operate in a different regime: their sensorimotor loop is linguistic, their environment is a user's evolving mental state, and their consequential actions are speech acts, tool invocations, and strategic silences. This paper proposes a conversational reinterpretation of the OpenPsi motivational lineage, coupled to MetaMo's higher-level motivational scaffold, for agents built on a modular execution substrate. Homeostasis is recast in dialogue-native terms: the agent regulates competence, uncertainty reduction, affiliation, affinity, legitimacy, nurturing, and aesthetic coherence rather than bodily deficits. We propose three contributions: a ten-stage motivational processing pipeline that architecturally separates cognitive modulation from situational appraisal; a dual decision strategy blending urgency-driven fast response with deliberative multi-goal optimization; and an architecturally useful distinction between pre-action feelings and post-action emotions as functionally different forms of affect. We specialize the framework to two example agents -- CompanionAgent and ResearchAgent -- and sketch its extension to social robotics and domain-generic human-level AGI. Comments: 16 pages. Accepted for AGI-26 proceedings Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2606.05411 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.05411v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05411 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Anna Mikeda Ms [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 20:25:15 UTC (33 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)