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
PragAlign is a feedback‑guided framework that improves synthetic dialogue generation by iteratively generating, evaluating, and revising conversations to meet specified service context, target intent, and target emotion. Using an LLM‑based evaluator that scores intent alignment, emotion alignment, coherence, fluency, and overall quality, PragAlign achieves a 99.50% acceptance rate on 800 dialogue specifications, outperforming one‑shot and repeated generation without feedback. Human evaluation confirms that intent expression and dialogue flow are reliably recognized, while emotion appropriateness remains more variable.
By Smitha Muthya Sudheendra, Jaideep Srivastava
arXiv:2608. 12062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Developing dialogue systems capable of engaging in multi-turn, goal-oriented conversations remains a significant challenge, especially in specialized domains with limited data.
By Lior Baruch, Moshe Butman, Kfir Bar, Doron Friedman
arXiv:2608. 07499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development and benchmarking of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Motivational Interviewing (MI) counsellors now often rely on LLM-based simulated clients.
By Jiading Zhu, Xinyu Cindy Wang, Thomas Nguyen, Yan Qing Lee, Osnat C. Melamed, Peter Selby, Jonathan Rose
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: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:2507. 02950v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) may support counseling training, yet evidence from Japanese-language interactions and automated quality ratings remains limited.
By Keita Kiuchi, Yoshikazu Fujimoto, Hideyuki Goto, Tomonori Hosokawa, Makoto Nishimura, Yosuke Sato, Izumi Sezai, Tomohiro Inoue
arXiv:2606. 30491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background.
By Zhuhan Bao, Rui Yang, Bohao Yang, Zhiyi Liu, Sicheng Shu, Ruio Heerschap, Le Li, Doris Yang, Elisabeth Bond, Haoyuan Wang, Nicoleta Economou-Zavlanos, Joshua M. Biro, Matthew McDermott, Nan Liu, Anand Chowdhury, Kai Sun, Kathryn Pollak, Ed Hammond, Chuan Hong
The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.
By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv:2607.23648v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Using large language models (LLMs) to assist psychological counseling is an important task in the field of natural language processing. The constru...
By Kaitong Weng, Lixin Liu, Zihao Liu, Bo Wang, Shiguang Ni
This scoping review examined 48 studies on generative AI chatbots designed to deliver motivational interviewing (MI). It found that most systems were text‑based and disembodied, with about half incorporating dynamic adaptation, and that safety reporting was inconsistent. While user perceptions were generally positive and many studies reported MI‑consistent interactions, evidence for sustained behavioral or functional change remains limited.
By Runze Hu, Jingqi Kong, Yang Yang, Yihang Yang, Jingyao Liu, Haizhou Tang, Shanghang Zhang, Zheng Liu
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