Related papers: Cactus: Towards Psychological Counseling Conversat…
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,…
LLM-based client simulation has emerged as a promising tool for training novice counselors and evaluating automated counseling systems. However, existing client simulation approaches face three key challenges: (1) limited diversity and…
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced various fields, including natural language processing and automated dialogue systems. This paper explores the application of LLMs in psychological counseling, addressing…
Generating psychological counseling responses with language models relies heavily on high-quality datasets. Crowdsourced data collection methods require strict worker training, and data from real-world counseling environments may raise…
Student mental health is a sensitive issue that necessitates special attention. A primary concern is the student-to-counselor ratio, which surpasses the recommended standard of 250:1 in most universities. This imbalance results in extended…
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…
The demand for conversational agents that provide mental health care is consistently increasing. In this work, we develop a psychological counseling agent, referred to as CoCoA, that applies Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques to…
It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step in…
The development of AI for mental health is hindered by a lack of authentic therapy dialogues, due to strict privacy regulations and the fact that clinical sessions were historically rarely recorded. We present an LLM-driven pipeline that…
Dialogue systems controlled by predefined or rule-based scenarios derived from counseling techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), play an important role in mental health apps. Despite the need for responsible responses, it…
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…
Rising demand for mental health support has increased interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) for counseling. However, adapting LLMs to this high-risk safety-critical domain is hindered by the scarcity of real-world counseling data…
The growing demand for scalable psychological counseling highlights the need for high-quality, privacy-compliant data, yet such data remains scarce. Here we introduce MAGneT, a novel multi-agent framework for synthetic psychological…
Psychological consultation is essential for improving mental health and well-being, yet challenges such as the shortage of qualified professionals and scalability issues limit its accessibility. To address these challenges, we explore the…
Due to privacy concerns, open dialogue datasets for mental health are primarily generated through human or AI synthesis methods. However, the inherent implicit nature of psychological processes, particularly those of clients, poses…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) aims to identify and restructure automatic negative thoughts pertaining to involuntary interpretations of events, yet existing counseling agents struggle to identify and address them in dialogue settings.…
Simulating human clients in mental health counseling is crucial for training and evaluating counselors (both human or simulated) in a scalable manner. Nevertheless, past research on client simulation did not focus on complex conversation…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a proven approach for addressing the irrational thought patterns associated with mental health disorders, but its effectiveness relies on accurately identifying cognitive pathways to provide targeted…
Understanding the dynamics of counseling conversations is an important task, yet it is a challenging NLP problem regardless of the recent advance of Transformer-based pre-trained language models. This paper proposes a systematic approach to…
Therapeutic dialogue is not a sequence of isolated responses: client goals, motivation, resistance, and therapeutic alliance evolve over time. Yet current LLM-based mental health dialogue systems often lack explicit mechanisms for tracking…