Understanding clients' thoughts and beliefs is fundamental in counseling, yet current evaluations of LLM therapists often fail to assess this ability. Existing evaluation methods rely on client simulators that clearly disclose internal states to the therapist, making it difficult to determine whether an LLM therapist can uncover unexpressed perspectives. To address this limitation, we introduce MindVoyager, a novel evaluation framework featuring a controllable and realistic client simulator which dynamically adapts itself based on the ongoing counseling session, offering a more realistic and challenging evaluation environment. We further introduce evaluation metrics that assess the exploration ability of LLM therapists by measuring their thorough understanding of client's beliefs and thoughts.
@article{arxiv.2507.19643,
title = {Can You Share Your Story? Modeling Clients' Metacognition and Openness for LLM Therapist Evaluation},
author = {Minju Kim and Dongje Yoo and Yeonjun Hwang and Minseok Kang and Namyoung Kim and Minju Gwak and Beong-woo Kwak and Hyungjoo Chae and Harim Kim and Yunjoong Lee and Min Hee Kim and Dayi Jung and Kyong-Mee Chung and Jinyoung Yeo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.19643},
year = {2025}
}