Related papers: Consistent Client Simulation for Motivational Inte…
We present an end-to-end framework for generating synthetic users for evaluating interactive agents designed to encourage positive behavior changes, such as in health and lifestyle coaching. The synthetic users are grounded in health and…
We present an extensible user simulation toolkit to facilitate automatic evaluation of conversational recommender systems. It builds on an established agenda-based approach and extends it with several novel elements, including user…
Background: We present a Patient Simulator that leverages real world patient encounters which cover a broad range of conditions and symptoms to provide synthetic test subjects for development and testing of healthcare agentic models. The…
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…
We introduce a novel application of large language models (LLMs) in developing a virtual counselor capable of conducting motivational interviewing (MI) for alcohol use counseling. Access to effective counseling remains limited, particularly…
Objective: This paper introduces a patient simulator for scalable, automated evaluation of healthcare conversational agents, generating realistic, controllable interactions that systematically vary across medical, linguistic, and behavioral…
Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This…
Conversational Recommender System (CRS) leverages real-time feedback from users to dynamically model their preferences, thereby enhancing the system's ability to provide personalized recommendations and improving the overall user…
Large language models are increasingly deployed in multi-turn settings such as tutoring, support, and counseling, where reliability depends on preserving consistent roles, personas, and goals across long horizons. This requirement becomes…
Online psychological counseling dialogue systems are trending, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional in-person therapy. However, existing psychological counseling dialogue systems mainly focus on basic empathetic…
Effectively addressing client resistance is a sophisticated clinical skill in psychological counseling, yet practitioners often lack timely and scalable supervisory feedback to refine their approaches. Although current NLP research has…
Large language models show potential for scalable mental-health support by simulating Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) counselors. However, existing methods often rely on static cognitive profiles and omniscient single-agent simulation,…
We present a methodology to systematically test conversational recommender systems with regards to conversational breakdowns. It involves examining conversations generated between the system and simulated users for a set of pre-defined…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human users in interactive settings such as therapy, education, and social role-play. While these simulations enable scalable training and evaluation of AI agents, off-the-shelf…
User simulation is important for developing and evaluating human-centered AI, yet current student simulation in educational applications has significant limitations. Existing approaches focus on single learning experiences and do not…
User simulation is increasingly vital to develop and evaluate recommender systems (RSs). While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising avenues to simulate user behavior, they often struggle with the absence of specific task alignment…
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…
Conversational information access is an emerging research area. Currently, human evaluation is used for end-to-end system evaluation, which is both very time and resource intensive at scale, and thus becomes a bottleneck of progress. As an…
User simulators are essential for the scalable training and evaluation of interactive AI systems. However, existing approaches often rely on shallow user profiling, struggle to maintain persona consistency over long interactions, and are…
The advent of technology-enhanced interventions has significantly transformed mental health services, offering new opportunities for delivering psychotherapy, particularly in remote settings. This paper reports on a pilot study exploring…