Related papers: EmPO: Emotion Grounding for Empathetic Response Ge…

Conversational agents have made significant progress since ELIZA, expanding their role across various domains, including healthcare, education, and customer service. As these agents become increasingly integrated into daily human…

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…

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly more powerful in their ability to complete complex tasks. One such task in which LLMs are often employed is scoring, i.e., assigning a numerical value from a certain…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel academically but struggle with social intelligence tasks, such as creating good compromises. In this paper, we present methods for generating empathically neutral compromises between two opposing…

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate distress through empathetic dialogue, yet large language models (LLMs) face persistent challenges in delivering effective ESC due to low accuracy in strategy planning. Moreover, there…

Empathy, which is widely used in psychological counselling, is a key trait of everyday human conversations. Equipped with commonsense knowledge, current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on capturing implicit emotion within…

Emotional text-to-speech seeks to convey affect while preserving intelligibility and prosody, yet existing methods rely on coarse labels or proxy classifiers and receive only utterance-level feedback. We introduce Emotion-Aware Stepwise…

Chatbot research is advancing with the growing importance of chatbots in fields that require human interactions, such as customer support and mental health care. Despite these advancements, chatbots still face significant challenges in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated surprising performance on many tasks, including writing supportive messages that display empathy. Here, we had these models generate empathic messages in response to posts describing common…

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial, but standard methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are often complex and unstable. In this work, we propose a new, simpler approach that…

The distillation of knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) into Smaller Language Models (SLMs), preserving the capabilities and performance of LLMs while reducing model size, has played a key role in the proliferation of LLMs. Because…

The integration of emotional support into various conversational scenarios presents profound societal benefits, such as social interactions, mental health counseling, and customer service. However, there are unsolved challenges that hinder…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences is a crucial step in building helpful and safe AI tools, which usually involve training on supervised datasets. Popular algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) rely…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in advancing natural language processing, yet their potential to perpetuate biases poses significant concerns. This paper introduces a new framework employing Direct Preference Optimization…

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has enabled agents to represent virtual humans in societal simulations, facilitating diverse interactions within complex social systems. However, existing LLM-based agents exhibit severe…

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to provide empathetic and effective emotional assistance through dialogue, addressing the growing demand for mental health support. This paper presents our solution for the NLPCC 2025 Task 8 ESC…

Expressive robotic behavior is essential for the widespread acceptance of robots in social environments. Recent advancements in learned legged locomotion controllers have enabled more dynamic and versatile robot behaviors. However,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in human-centric applications, yet they often fail to provide substantive emotional support. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been utilized to enhance empathy of LLMs, existing…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is essential for safe and useful LLMs. Previous works mainly adopt reinforcement learning (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) with human feedback for alignment.…

Conventional algorithms for training language models (LMs) with human feedback rely on preferences that are assumed to account for an "average" user, disregarding subjectivity and finer-grained variations. Recent studies have raised…