Related papers: Consistent Client Simulation for Motivational Inte…
The prevalence of mental disorders has become a significant issue, leading to the increased focus on Emotional Support Conversation as an effective supplement for mental health support. Existing methods have achieved compelling results,…
The performance of a task-completion dialogue agent usually affects the user experience: when the conversation system yields an unreasonable response, users may feel dissatisfied. Besides, early termination often occurs in disappointing…
Simulations constitute a fundamental component of medical and nursing education and traditionally employ standardized patients (SP) and high-fidelity manikins to develop clinical reasoning and communication skills. However, these methods…
Mental-health support is increasingly mediated by conversational systems (e.g., LLM-based tools), but users often lack structured ways to audit the quality and potential risks of the support they receive. We introduce CounselReflect, an…
Conversational diagnosis requires multi-turn history-taking, where an agent asks clarifying questions to refine differential diagnoses under incomplete information. Existing approaches often rely on the parametric knowledge of a model or…
Psychological counseling is a fundamentally multimodal cognitive process in which clinicians integrate verbal content with visual and vocal cues to infer clients' mental states and respond empathically. However, most existing…
Existing methods for AI psychological counselors predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning using static dialogue datasets. However, this contrasts with human experts, who continuously refine their proficiency through clinical practice…
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,…
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) engage users in multi-turn interactions to deliver personalized recommendations. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further enhances these systems by enabling more natural and dynamic…
Psychological counseling faces huge challenges due to the growing demand for mental health services and the shortage of trained professionals. Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential to assist psychological counseling, especially…
Recent works leverage LLMs to roleplay realistic social scenarios, aiding novices in practicing their social skills. However, simulating sensitive interactions, such as in mental health, is challenging. Privacy concerns restrict data…
The advent of increasingly powerful language models has raised expectations for language-based interactions. However, controlling these models is a challenge, emphasizing the need to be able to investigate the feasibility and value of their…
In spoken conversations, spontaneous behaviors like filled pause and prolongations always happen. Conversational partner tends to align features of their speech with their interlocutor which is known as entrainment. To produce human-like…
Recommender systems are central to online services, enabling users to navigate through massive amounts of content across various domains. However, their evaluation remains challenging due to the disconnect between offline metrics and online…
Despite widespread interests in reinforcement-learning for task-oriented dialogue systems, several obstacles can frustrate research and development progress. First, reinforcement learners typically require interaction with the environment,…
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) enhance user experience through multi-turn interactions, yet evaluating CRS remains challenging. User simulators can provide comprehensive evaluations through interactions with CRS, but building…
Despite their potential as human proxies, LLMs often fail to generate heterogeneous data with human-like diversity, thereby diminishing their value in advancing social science research. To address this gap, we propose a novel method to…
Agent-based simulators provide granular representations of complex intelligent systems by directly modelling the interactions of the system's constituent agents. Their high-fidelity nature enables hyper-local policy evaluation and testing…
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has increased interest in their use as therapists to address mental health challenges and the widespread lack of access to care. However, experts have emphasized the critical need…
While there is evidence that user-adaptive support can greatly enhance the effectiveness of educational systems, designing such support for exploratory learning environments (e.g., simulations) is still challenging due to the open-ended…