arXiv AI

Risk Governance for Generative AI Mental Health Support: A Multi-Turn Safety Architecture

arXiv:2607. 22692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support despite lacking mechanisms to safely govern evolving mental health risk.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

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.

By Lei Wang, Xiao Wang, Lei Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

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
Sep 15

K-Bench: a clinically calibrated benchmark for evaluating large language models in high-risk mental health conversations

arXiv:2609.15855v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: % !TEX root = ../main.tex People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) for mental health support, yet their safety in evolving, high-risk con...

By Laura M. Vowels, Matthew J. Vowels, Shivali Sharma, Apoorv Jha, Rehnuma Choudhury, Wasseem El Sarraj, Rachel Francois-Walcott, Aruba Hussain, Sarah Ingram, Angela Loulopoulou, Adva Segal, Elena Volkova
arXiv AI
Aug 24

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
Sep 24

Safety Nudges: User-Facing Interventions for Real-Time AI Risk Awareness

The paper introduces Safety Nudges, a browser-based tool that displays lightweight, in situ flags when a conversational AI exhibits risky behavior such as hallucination or overconfidence. In a two‑week field study with 45 frequent chatbot users, participants reported that the nudges were useful, clear, and minimally disruptive, and most felt more aware of potential AI harms. However, increased awareness did not automatically translate into measurable changes in user behavior, underscoring the need for relevance, calibration, and user control in nudge design.

By Varshini Elangovan, James Wedgwood, Chhavi Yadav, William Agnew, Sauvik Das, Virginia Smith
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Safety boundary maintenance in consumer AI systems responding to pediatric health queries: a cross-platform benchmark evaluation under naturalistic and adversarially pressured conditions

arXiv:2601.09721v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Consumer artificial intelligence chatbots are now accessed by hundreds of millions of users seeking health information, yet systematic evalua...

By Vahideh Zolfaghari, Leila Mashhadi, Mitra Ahadi, Farzaneh Sedaghatkar, MohammadReza Kargozari