相关论文: Stress-Testing Emotional Support Models: Moving fr…
When users seek social support from chatbots, they disclose their situation gradually, yet most evaluations of supportive LLMs rely on single-turn, fully specified prompts. We introduce a multi-turn simulation framework that closes this…
Emotional Support Dialogue Systems (ESDSes) are increasingly evaluated and trained with LLM-simulated seekers. However, such simulated seekers often behave as cooperative, average-case users who disclose clearly, respond constructively, and…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
In the realm of mental health support chatbots, it is vital to show empathy and encourage self-exploration to provide tailored solutions. However, current approaches tend to provide general insights or solutions without fully understanding…
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…
Existing user simulators (USs) for task-oriented dialogue systems only model user behaviour on semantic and natural language levels without considering the user persona and emotions. Optimising dialogue systems with generic user policies,…
As mental health chatbots proliferate to address the global treatment gap, a critical question emerges: How do we design for relational safety the quality of interaction patterns that unfold across conversations rather than the correctness…
Tests executed by human testers are still widespread in practice and fill the gap left by limitations of automated approaches. Among the human-centered approaches, exploratory testing is the de facto approach in agile teams. Although it is…
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,…
Substance use disorders (SUDs) affect millions of people, and relapses are common, requiring multi-session treatments. Access to care is limited, which contributes to the challenge of recovery support. We present \textbf{ChatThero}, an…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable advancements in psychological counseling. However, existing models generally do not explicitly model seekers' emotion shifts across counseling sessions, a core focus in classical…
Emotional support conversation (ESC) helps reduce people's psychological stress and provide emotional value through interactive dialogues. Due to the high cost of crowdsourcing a large ESC corpus, recent attempts use large language models…
Constrained by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in AI-driven mental health, researchers develop LLM-based conversational agents (CAs) with tailored configurations, such as profiles, symptoms, and scenarios, to…
Demand for mental health support through AI chatbots is surging, though current systems present several limitations, like sycophancy or overvalidation, and reinforcement of maladaptive beliefs. A core obstacle to the creation of better…
Tool agents interact with users through multi-turn dialogues to accomplish various tasks. Recent studies have adopted user simulation methods to develop these agents in multi-turn settings. However, existing user simulators tend to be…
Personalized support is essential to fulfill individuals' emotional needs and sustain their mental well-being. Large language models (LLMs), with great customization flexibility, hold promises to enable individuals to create their own…
This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients…
The research community has traditionally shown a keen interest in emotion modeling, with a notable emphasis on the detection aspect. In contrast, the exploration of emotion generation has received less attention.This study delves into an…
Existing emotion-aware conversational models usually focus on controlling the response contents to align with a specific emotion class, whereas empathy is the ability to understand and concern the feelings and experience of others. Hence,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising potential in providing empathetic support during interactions. However, their responses often become verbose or overly formulaic, failing to adequately address the diverse emotional…