Language models are increasingly expected to support users in stressful or uncertain situations, where warmth and empathy are desirable. While recent work associates warmer models with reduced reliabi...
arXiv:2606. 27709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for social warmth degrades factual reliability and increases sycophancy.
By Austin MY Cheung, Yi Yang
arXiv:2609.15089v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Empathetic response generation in spoken dialogue systems requires both accurate emotion perception and appropriate emotion regulation. Grounded in psy...
By Hongyu Jin, Wenda Zhang, Runqiu Fei, Gongping Huang, Mike Conway, Ting Dang
Emotional dialogue research includes two influential strategy traditions. Empathetic dialogue prioritizes understanding a speaker's emotional experience.
arXiv:2609.15654v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Activation steering has been used to control traits such as honesty, refusal, and sycophancy, yet supportive empathy is evaluated along multiple dimens...
By JuHeon Ha, Byounghan Lee, Yunseo Choi, Kyung-Ah Sohn
The paper introduces FIGS, a dual‑axis evaluation framework for multi‑turn sycophancy that avoids penalizing empathy. It uses a 10‑turn conversational simulator with 500 diverse scenarios to test whether models stay truthful while keeping praise proportional, and whether they show calibrated validation of user feelings. The study finds that current models either drift toward sycophancy or become overly detached, highlighting an unresolved trade‑off in sustained dialogue.
By Sidharth Pulipaka, Ruta Binkyte, Ivaxi Sheth, Sahar Abdelnabi
arXiv:2606. 30256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety benchmarks often buy scalability by fixing the prompt, the language, and the turn structure.
By Camilo Chac\'on Sartori
arXiv:2610.27603v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Empathetic interaction involves two distinguishable capacities: representing another person's emotional state (cognitive empathy) and generating an app...
By Samhita Bollepally, Takashi Yamauchi, Marissa West
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support, raising concern that sustained use may draw users away from their real-world relationships. Yet existing evaluations primarily...
LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks use hand-authored scenarios and prompted simulators, aggregate empathy into one score, and overlook judge biases such as same-family favoritism and scale drift.
arXiv:2607. 15282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathy is most often theorized as resonance: a mirroring of another's present emotional or cognitive state.
By Molood Arman
arXiv:2608. 02046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated.
By Yao Liu, Guangjia Chai, Yuming Huang, Jihao Huang, Lei Wang, Junchen Wan