arXiv:2504. 11837v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations.
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...
arXiv:2608.29035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotion recognition in conversations is increasingly tackled with language models, but these models can be unstable and expensive to fine-tune or to pr...
The paper introduces the Affective Flow Language Model (AFlow), which treats multi‑turn emotional support conversations as an evolving affective utility flow along dialogue trajectories. AFlow searches diverse support paths, estimates utilities of intermediate states, and employs Affective Flow Preference Optimization (AFPO) to propagate downstream preference signals to earlier states, enabling consistent strategy transitions. Experiments on ExTES and ESConv demonstrate improved strategy alignment, response diversity, and generation quality across various model settings.
arXiv:2606. 09837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotional interaction is increasingly crucial for conversational AI, yet current systems lack a self-emotion determination mechanism to drive the streaming text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis.
arXiv:2507.01594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems aim to help users accomplish goals through natural language interaction. Beyond task success, effective ToD sy...
arXiv:2603. 25031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In psychological support and emotional companionship scenarios, the core limitation of large language models (LLMs) lies not merely in response quality, but in their reliance on local next-token prediction, which prevents them from maintaining the temporal continuity, stage awareness, and user consent boundaries required for multi-turn intervention.
arXiv:2609.05806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) aims to identify speakers' emotions in multi-turn dialogue. Accurate emotion recognition can support a wide...
Existing emotional support conversation systems mainly focus on one-on-one seeker-supporter interactions and individual emotional states, leaving interpersonal relations in multi-party scenarios under...
The paper introduces RESCUE-BENCH, a benchmark for relation-aware multi‑party emotional support conversation systems. It is built from real couple and family interview data, comprising 191 samples, 7,079 annotated turns, and 1,064.8 minutes of video, and defines six tasks that assess relational understanding and relation‑sensitive support. Experiments with ten large language models show that while they handle local emotional cues reasonably well, they struggle with tasks that require modeling interpersonal relations, such as predicting relation patterns, viewpoints, and support strategies.
arXiv:2607. 28648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support tasks, such as negative thought reframing.
arXiv:2508. 09521v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional support conversations require more than fluent responses.
The paper introduces EmoStance, a method for controlling the affective orientation of empathetic responses in dialogue systems. It leverages weak supervision from multi‑annotator emoji distributions to create a latent control space that approximates listener stance, and uses a frozen instruction‑tuned LLM steered by continuous prefix embeddings. Evaluation shows a 62.2% decisive win rate over baselines, especially in contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness.