In real-world collaboration, alignment, process structure, and outcome quality do not exhibit a simple linear or one-to-one correspondence: similar alignment may accompany either rapid convergence or extensive multi-branch exploration, and lead to different results. Existing accounts often isolate these dimensions or focus on specific participant types, limiting structural accounts of collaboration. We reconceptualize collaboration through two complementary lenses. The task lens models collaboration as trajectory evolution in a structured task space, revealing patterns such as advancement, branching, and backtracking. The intent lens examines how individual intents are expressed within shared contexts and enter situated decisions. Together, these lenses clarify the structural relationships among alignment, decision-making, and trajectory structure. Rather than reducing collaboration to outcome quality or treating alignment as the sole objective, we propose a unified dynamic view of the relationships among alignment, process, and outcome, and use it to re-examine collaboration structure across Human-Human, AI-AI, and Human-AI settings.

翻译：在现实世界的协作中，对齐、过程结构与结果质量并不呈现简单的线性或一一对应关系：相似的对齐状态可能伴随快速收敛，也可能伴随广泛的多分支探索，并导致不同的结果。现有研究往往孤立这些维度或聚焦于特定参与者类型，限制了关于协作的结构性解释。我们通过两个互补的视角重新概念化协作。任务视角将协作建模为结构化任务空间中的轨迹演化，揭示了诸如推进、分支与回溯等模式。意图视角则考察个体意图如何在共享语境中被表达，并进入具体情境的决策。这两个视角共同阐明了对齐、决策与轨迹结构之间的结构性关系。我们并非将协作简化为结果质量，或将对齐视为唯一目标，而是提出了一个关于对齐、过程与结果之间关系的统一动态视角，并借此重新审视跨人类-人类、AI-AI 以及人类-AI 场景的协作结构。