Graph2Counsel is a framework that generates synthetic counseling dialogues by leveraging Client Psychological Graphs (CPGs) to encode the relationships among a client’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The system uses a structured prompting pipeline guided by counselor strategies and explores techniques such as Chain‑of‑Thought and Multi‑Agent Feedback to produce 760 realistic sessions from 76 CPGs. Expert evaluation shows the dataset surpasses previous ones in specificity, counselor competence, authenticity, conversational flow, and safety, and fine‑tuning an open‑source model on it improves performance on several counseling benchmarks.
By Aishik Mandal, Hiba Arnaout, Clarissa W. Ong, Juliet Bockhorst, Kate Sheehan, Rachael Moldow, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Iryna Gurevych
MindEval2 is a new evaluation framework for AI chatbots in mental health support, comprising Mental Health Quality Rubrics (MHQR) and the MindSim patient simulation harness. MHQR, developed with PhD-level psychologists, provides explicit, actionable criteria for assessing response quality, while MindSim offers realistic, longitudinal patient interactions with a memory component. The study evaluated 18 models, finding that although surface-level quality has improved, guidance calibration remains the main failure across all models.
By John Mendon\c{c}a, Daniel Tschernutter, Jos\'e Pombal, Areti Vassilopoulos, Catarina Botelho, Ignacio Sarasua, Maya D'Eon, Nuno Guerreiro, Ricardo Rei
arXiv:2610.08250v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to simulate clients for counselor training and psychological counseling research, but reliable simulation r...
By Shixin Peng, Kun Jiang, Jiaxing Zheng, Qihao Yang, Jingying Chen
The paper introduces StratCBT, a new dataset of 9,688 psychological counseling sessions with 256K utterances, each counselor response aligned to one of eight Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) strategies. It was created by modeling clients’ negative thoughts and generating high‑quality conversations through self‑chat, using realistic sessions for guidance. Experiments show that strategy‑aligned generation improves professional and effective counseling when evaluated with large language model‑simulated clients.
By Zimu Wang, Yiwen Jiang, Xiangyu Zhao, Yaling Shen, Jiahe Liu, Stephanie Fong, Maxmartwell H Cheng, Guilherme C Oliveira, Anh Nguyen, Robert Desimone, Barnaby Nelson, Dominic Dwyer, Zongyuan Ge
arXiv:2606. 30887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models show promise for mental health support, yet therapeutic quality improves only when evaluation functions as an actionable control signal rather than a passive metric.
By Mizanur Rahman, Abeer Badawi, Elahe Rahimi, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Frank Rudzicz, Enamul Hoque, Elham Dolatabadi
arXiv:2610.02885v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Mental health disorders affect a substantial proportion of the global population, yet a persistent shortage of trained practitioners leaves the majorit...
By Yuting Yan, Shihao Xu, Junhao Yu, Mingcong Zuo, Lu Chen, Nan Xiang, Haiyang Geng, Dongjie Tao, Minghao Wang
MACBT is a clinician‑facing AI decision‑support system that models the five‑stage CBT workflow with five collaborative agents and incorporates a CBT‑specific longitudinal memory module (CD Memory) to track cognitive distortions across sessions. The system generates pre‑session pathology reports and prioritises interventions, and was trained on a Chinese CBT dialogue corpus using a Qwen3‑14B backbone with supervised fine‑tuning and preference optimisation. Evaluation by GPT‑4 judges shows MACBT outperforms several existing chatbots in professionalism and clinical authenticity, and the memory‑augmented version improves session quality by 12.6% and achieves a longitudinal mean of 2.29 on continuity, progression, and personalization.
By De Jiang, Shuo Zhang, Weiwei Liao, Jianying Zhang, Chuanhui Yu, Hongen Liao, Kehong Yuan
arXiv:2510.25384v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising tools for synthetic data generation in mental health. However, privacy policies and restrictions forced...
By Doan Nam Long Vu, Rui Tan, Lena Moench, Svenja Jule Francke, Daniel Woiwod, Florian Thomas-Odenthal, Sanna Stroth, Tilo Kircher, Christiane Hermann, Udo Dannlowski, Hamidreza Jamalabadi, Simone Balloccu, Shaoxiong Ji
arXiv:2608.22615v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based counseling agents can generate fluent and supportive responses, but they often lack the structured, goal-directed prog...
By Qi Zhang, Heajun An, Prakriti Dumaru, Sang Won Lee, Lifu Huang, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Jin-Hee Cho
arXiv:2606. 16307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets.
By Rahul Khedar, Eshita, Sneha Teja Sree Reddy Thondapu, Mayank Malhotra, Arup Das, Jitesh Chandra, Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Arun Menon, Linsey Pang, Avinash Karn, Mouli V, Prakhar Mehrotra
arXiv:2609.17180v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal counselor response generation (MCRG) aims to generate an appropriate counselor response from multimodal dialogue histories. Progress is limi...
By Wenjie Zheng, Qiming Xie, Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia
arXiv:2608.22251v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Rising global demand for mental health support creates significant service delivery challenges, with asynchronous email counselling serving as a cruc...
By Philipp Steigerwald, Nico Bienlein, Jennifer Burghardt, Mara Stieler, Robert Lehmann, Jens Albrecht