Related papers: An Empathetic AI Coach for Self-Attachment Therapy
Conversational agents are increasingly used as support tools along mental therapeutic pathways with significant societal impacts. In particular, empathy is a key non-functional requirement in therapeutic contexts, yet current chatbot…
Individuals with diverse motor abilities often benefit from intensive and specialized rehabilitation therapies aimed at enhancing their functional recovery. Nevertheless, the challenge lies in the restricted availability of…
Artificial agents capable of understanding and aligning with others' intentions are essential for safe and socially robust artificial intelligence. We introduce a computational framework for empathy in active inference agents, grounded in…
Affective computing has made significant strides in emotion recognition and generation, yet current approaches mainly focus on short-term pattern recognition and lack a comprehensive framework to guide affective agents toward long-term…
One challenge for dialogue agents is recognizing feelings in the conversation partner and replying accordingly, a key communicative skill. While it is straightforward for humans to recognize and acknowledge others' feelings in a…
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly embedded in everyday life, the ability of interactive agents to express empathy has become critical for effective human-AI interaction, particularly in emotionally sensitive…
Current AI counseling systems struggle with maintaining effective long-term client engagement. Through formative research with counselors and a systematic literature review, we identified five key design considerations for AI counseling…
Social robots and conversational agents are being explored as supports for wellbeing, goal-setting, and everyday self-regulation. While prior work highlights their potential to motivate and guide users, much of the evidence relies on…
Negotiation is a complex social interaction that encapsulates emotional encounters in human decision-making. Virtual agents that can negotiate with humans are useful in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of such…
Young people's mental well-being is a global concern, with peer support playing a key role in daily emotional regulation. Conversational agents are increasingly viewed as promising tools for delivering accessible, personalised peer support,…
This paper presents a qualitative analysis of participants' perceptions of a robotic coach conducting Positive Psychology exercises, providing insights for the future design of robotic coaches. Participants (n = 20) took part in a…
We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users…
Creating effective dialogue systems for mental health support requires high-quality multi-turn counseling dialogue data, yet collecting real counselor-client conversations presents significant challenges, including privacy concerns, high…
With increasing physicians' workload and patients' needs for care, there is a need for technology that facilitates physicians work and performs continues follow-up with patients. Existing approaches focus merely on improving patient's…
Testing conversational AI systems at scale across diverse domains necessitates realistic and diverse user interactions capturing a wide array of behavioral patterns. We present a novel multi-agent framework for realistic, explainable human…
Current mental-health conversational systems are usually based on fixed, generic dialogue patterns. This paper proposes an adaptive framework based on large language models that aims to personalize therapeutic interaction according to a…
Recently, advancements in AI counseling based on large language models have shown significant progress. However, existing studies employ a one-time generation approach to synthesize multi-turn dialogue samples, resulting in low therapy…
This paper outlines the EMPATHIC Research & Innovation project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and plat-forms for future generations of Personalized Virtual Coaches to assist elderly people…
Empathy is critical to successful mental health support. Empathy measurement has predominantly occurred in synchronous, face-to-face settings, and may not translate to asynchronous, text-based contexts. Because millions of people use…
Objective: Domestic abuse cases have risen significantly over the last four years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges for victims and survivors in accessing support. In this study, we investigate the role that chatbots…