arXiv AI

A Safety-Gated Multimodal AI Backend for Mental-Health Support: Hierarchical State Representation, Conservative Risk Fusion, and Controlled Generation in Anian

Anian is a safety‑gated multimodal AI backend designed for perinatal mental‑health support and mindfulness‑intervention routing. It maps user input into a four‑layer hierarchical state representation—emotion, psychosocial constructs, safety risk, and intervention routes—then fuses local and external risk signals to decide whether to generate AI responses or provide fixed safety content. Prototype evaluation on large public corpora showed high classification performance and perfect high‑risk recall in a controlled stress test, though clinical validity remains unestablished.

arXiv AI
6d ago

When Vocabulary Comprehension Fails Clinical Reasoning: Evaluating Therapy Bots' Safety Risks for Generation Alpha

The paper evaluates the safety of conversational AI therapy bots for Generation Alpha, revealing that while these models understand 76‑82% of youth‑specific vocabulary, they correctly assess clinical risk only 64‑72% of the time, creating a significant vocabulary‑comprehension gap. Six failure patterns—such as sarcasm masking, minimization acceptance, and semantic drift—were identified, with compounded errors leading to a 94% miss rate when three or more patterns co‑occur. The authors estimate 146,880 missed crises annually and recommend mandatory human‑in‑the‑loop systems, quarterly youth‑specific validation, transparent performance disclosure, and regulatory oversight for youth‑facing mental health AI.

By Manisha Mehta, Virendra Mehta
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour

arXiv:2606. 18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time.

By Abeer Badawi, Moyosoreoluwa Olatosi, Negin Baghbanzadeh, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Frank Rudzicz, R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Sara Pishdadian, Elham Dolatabadi
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Large Language Models in Mental Health: A Systematic Review of Applications, Innovations, and Ethical Challenges

The paper reviews how large language models are applied in mental health, covering areas such as social media analysis, clinical conversational agents, therapy support tools, prompt engineering, and multimodal learning. It synthesizes interdisciplinary studies that use social media posts, electronic medical records, and multimodal inputs to detect depression, assess suicide risk, provide personalized therapy, and generate psychoeducational content. The review also discusses advances in model interpretability, annotation strategies, multimodal fusion techniques, and highlights ethical, sociotechnical, and regulatory challenges while proposing frameworks for safe, equitable, and accountable deployment.

By Yisong Chen, Yifan Gao, Sijing Yu, Chuqing Zhao, Yang Lu
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Training Therapeutic Judges and Multi-Agent Systems for Human-Aligned Mental Health Support

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 Computation and Language
6d ago

Trust Stack for Mental Health AI: A Survey of Calibration across Human, Interaction, and AI Layers

The paper surveys 61 studies on mental‑health AI and identifies a misalignment in how trust is evaluated across disciplines. It proposes a three‑layer framework—human‑oriented, interaction‑oriented, and AI‑oriented trust—and maps stakeholder perspectives onto these layers. The authors argue that future research should focus on calibrating human trust to actual interaction and AI trustworthiness rather than merely maximizing perceived trust.

By Xin Sun, Yue Su, Yifan Mo, Qingyu Meng, Yuxuan Li, Min Chen, Mengyuan Zhang, Saku Sugawara, Charlotte Gerritsen, Sander L. Koole, Koen Hindriks, Jiahuan Pei
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Adversarial Pragmatics for AI Safety Evaluation: A Diagnostic Framework and Seed Benchmark for Language-Mediated Control

arXiv:2607. 01153v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety evaluations for language models increasingly depend on judgments about ambiguous natural-language behaviour: whether a model followed an instruction, refused appropriately, complied with a policy, or misreported progress in an agentic task.

By Brett Reynolds