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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…
Mental health is a growing global concern, prompting interest in AI-driven solutions to expand access to psychosocial support. \emph{Peer support}, grounded in lived experience, offers a valuable complement to professional care. However,…
LLMs are popular among clinicians for decision-support because of simple text-based interaction. However, their impact on clinicians' performance is ambiguous. Not knowing how clinicians use this new technology and how they compare it to…
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…
Conversational counselor agents have become essential tools for addressing the rising demand for scalable and accessible mental health support. This paper introduces CAMI, a novel automated counselor agent grounded in Motivational…
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…
As emotional support chatbots have recently gained significant traction across both research and industry, a common evaluation strategy has emerged: use help-seeker simulators to interact with supporter chatbots. However, current simulators…
Design feedback helps practitioners improve their artifacts while also fostering reflection and design reasoning. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can support design work, but often provide generic, one-off suggestions that…
Empathy is a critical factor in fostering positive user experiences in conversational AI. While models can display empathy, it is often generic rather than tailored to specific tasks and contexts. In this work, we introduce a novel…
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,…
While virtual reality (VR) excels at simulating physical environments, its effectiveness for training complex interpersonal skills is limited by a lack of psychologically plausible virtual humans. This gap is particularly critical in…
Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in providing scalable mental health support, while evaluating their counseling capability remains crucial to ensure both efficacy and safety. Existing evaluations are limited by the static…
Designing dialog tutors has been challenging as it involves modeling the diverse and complex pedagogical strategies employed by human tutors. Although there have been significant recent advances in neural conversational systems using large…
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…
Accurately simulating the decisions of a specific individual remains challenging for large language models (LLMs), partly because persona information is often provided as static descriptions that miss the values, experiences, and contextual…
Developing compassionate interactive systems requires agents to not only understand user emotions but also provide diverse, substantive support. While recent works explore empathetic dialogue generation, they remain limited in response form…
Current technologies have enabled us to track and quantify our physical state and behavior. Self-tracking aims to achieve increased awareness to decrease undesired behaviors and lead to a healthier lifestyle. However, inappropriately…
Motivational-interviewing-based health coaching is an effective approach for improving mental health and promoting healthy behavior change. However, the scarcity of trained human coaches and the high cost of coaching services make such…
Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing education, with LLM-based agents playing a key role in simulating student behavior. A major challenge in student simulation is modeling the diverse learning patterns of students at various…