Related papers: When Seekers Are Hard to Help: Evaluating Emotiona…

Enhancing user engagement through interactions plays an essential role in socially-driven dialogues. While prior works have optimized models to reason over relevant knowledge or plan a dialogue act flow, the relationship between user…

In Machine Translation, assessing the quality of a large amount of automatic translations can be challenging. Automatic metrics are not reliable when it comes to high performing systems. In addition, resorting to human evaluators can be…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been previously explored for mental healthcare training and therapy client simulation, but they still fall short in authentically capturing diverse client traits and psychological conditions. We introduce…

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), has opened exciting possibilities for constructing computational simulations designed to replicate human behavior accurately. Current research suggests that LLM-based agents become increasingly…

As AI systems become increasingly integrated into daily life, their potential to exacerbate or trigger severe psychological harms remains poorly understood and inadequately tested. This paper presents a proactive methodology for…

Reinforcement learning based dialogue policies are typically trained in interaction with a user simulator. To obtain an effective and robust policy, this simulator should generate user behaviour that is both realistic and varied. Current…

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to provide emotional support (ES) to improve one's mental state. Existing works stay at fitting grounded responses and responding strategies (e.g., question), which ignore the effect on ES and lack…

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…

This paper investigates the capacity of small language models (0.5B-5B parameters) to generate empathetic responses for individuals with PTSD. We introduce Trauma-Informed Dialogue for Empathy (TIDE), a novel dataset comprising 10,000…

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering practice is reshaping how software testing activities are performed. LLMs are increasingly used to support software testing. Consequently, software testing…

Although LLM-based conversational agents demonstrate strong fluency and coherence, they still produce undesirable behaviors (errors) that are challenging to prevent from reaching users during deployment. Recent research leverages large…

Emotional Support Conversation aims at reducing the seeker's emotional distress through supportive response. Existing approaches have two limitations: (1) They ignore the emotion causes of the distress, which is important for fine-grained…

The growing prominence of LLMs has led to an increase in the development of AI tutoring systems. These systems are crucial in providing underrepresented populations with improved access to valuable education. One important area of education…

Simulations, although powerful in accurately replicating real-world systems, often remain inaccessible to non-technical users due to their complexity. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) provide intuitive, language-based interactions…

User simulators can rapidly generate a large volume of timely user behavior data, providing a testing platform for reinforcement learning-based recommender systems, thus accelerating their iteration and optimization. However, prevalent user…

With generative AI advancing, empathy in human-AI interaction is essential. While prior work focuses on emotional reflection, emotional exploration, key to deeper engagement, remains overlooked. Existing LLMs rely on text which captures…

This study addresses the interaction challenges encountered by spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) when engaging with users who exhibit distinct conversational behaviors, particularly minors, in scenarios where data are scarce. We propose a…

The growing demand for accessible mental health support requires training more counselors, yet existing approaches remain resource-intensive and difficult to scale. LLMs can realistically simulate patients and generate actionable feedback…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved unprecedented success in several objective multimodal reasoning tasks. However, to further enhance their capabilities of empathetic and effective communication with humans, improving how…

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in neural speech synthesis. While the deep neural network achieves the state-of-the-art result in text-to-speech (TTS) tasks, how to generate a more emotional and more expressive speech is…