arXiv AI

MIND: Unified Inquiry and Diagnosis RL with Criteria Grounded Clinical Supports for Psychiatric Consultation

arXiv AI
Jul 10

MentalHospital: A Virtual Environment for Evaluating Psychiatric Clinical Encounters

arXiv:2607. 08257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on isolated psychiatric tasks, including dialogue, diagnosis, and treatment planning, yet existing benchmarks rarely simulate complete psychiatric clinical encounters.

By Yuming Yang, Xiao Sun, Yuanwei Zou, Zhengxiao Wu, Yun Chen, Jiang Zhong, Haoyang Zeng, Jingwang Huang, Kaiwen Wei
arXiv AI
Oct 7

PsyCIDRA: A Dual-Agent Framework for Psychiatric Interviewing and Diagnostic Reasoning

PsyCIDRA is a dual‑agent framework that couples a free‑form psychiatric interviewer with a diagnostic reasoning agent to support expert review. The interviewer agent uses tools to keep working notes, load expert skills, and pull ICD‑11 references, while the diagnostic agent receives the interview transcript and generates hypotheses with supporting, conflicting, and missing evidence, withholding a final hypothesis if insufficient support exists. In simulations and a blinded human study, PsyCIDRA achieved higher diagnostic agreement and rank‑1 accuracy than direct prompting, indicating its promise for assisting psychiatric assessment through interactive dialogue.

By Milad Mohammadi, Fatemeh Akrami Shamsabadi, Zahra Mohseni, Amirhossein Safdarian, Malekfarhad Malek, Hadi Moradi, Hesham Faili
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Ask Before You Diagnose: Safe-Psych, a Sequential Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs in Psychiatry

arXiv:2607. 13036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision support in healthcare, but clinical evidence is often incomplete or evolving.

By Oriana Presacan, Andreea Grama, Larisa Irimin\u{a}, Alireza Nik, Jaya Ojha, Vajira Thambawita, Ciprian I. B\u{a}cil\u{a}, Bogdan Ionescu, Michael A. Riegler
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

MindEval2: Clinically Grounded Patients and Rubrics for Evaluating Language Models in Mental Health Support

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 AI
Sep 28

MACBT: A Multi-Agent Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Decision Support System with Longitudinal Memory

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 AI
Sep 21

Clinician-Grounded Quality Assurance for AI-Assisted Psychiatric Intake

The paper introduces a clinician‑grounded evaluation platform called InterviewPlayground, which uses a memory‑augmented patient simulator to assess AI‑assisted psychiatric intake systems. It supports comparison across different interviewing styles, reduces clinician workload, and measures clinically relevant performance. In a pilot study, a GPT‑based intake interviewer captured more relevant items but made more unfounded inferences and missed safety concerns compared to clinicians.

By King Shi, Amanda Li, Jonathan Ivey, Synthia Qia Wang, Guan Gui, Hyunseo Kim, Peter Zandi, Jason Straub, Jacob Taylor, Ananya Joshi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Evidence-Bounded Mental Health Reasoning from Heterogeneous Speech Protocols

The paper introduces Evidence-Bounded Mental Health Reasoning, addressing the problem that current multimodal mental health screening models treat all clinical speech protocols as equally evidential. It presents the Evidence Package Benchmark, comprising 1,870 annotated packages from six diverse protocols, and proposes EviBound, a protocol-aware framework that limits reasoning to valid evidence using a planner, acoustic consensus, and a boundary critic. EviBound outperforms existing omni-modal baselines, achieving a Depression AUROC of 0.8658 with no claim violations.

By Chengyuan Gao, Jiang Wu, Tao Lu, Jiayan Guo, Mingkun Xu, Tianyi Zang, Shangyang Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

An evidence-guided reinforcement learning method to improve psychiatric reasoning in small language models

The paper introduces ClinMPO, an evidence‑guided reinforcement‑learning framework that enhances psychiatric reasoning in small language models (SLMs). ClinMPO leverages a reward model (ClinRM) trained on 18,569 question–answer pairs from 4,474 psychiatry articles and is guided by the psychiatrist‑defined Clinical Psychiatry Thinking Strategy (CPTS). Evaluations on four Qwen3 model sizes show that ClinMPO outperforms baseline, supervised fine‑tuning, and standard policy optimization, with the 8B model surpassing a human baseline of senior pre‑licensure medical students and achieving the highest rank among 31 models. Blinded clinician assessment confirms improved rationale quality across CPTS criteria, demonstrating that clinical evidence and specialist knowledge can be effectively incorporated into medical AI development.

By Xinxin Lin, Guangxin Dai, Yi Zhong, Xiang Li, Xue Xiao, Jian Liu, Yixin Zhang, Lingming Hu, Zhengdong Wu, Yongbo Zheng, Runchuan Zhu, Ming Zhao, Huizi Yu, Yi Zhang, Fangting Lu, Shuo Wu, Jun Zhao, Ping Yin, Joey W. Y. Chan, Ngan Yin Chan, Yumei Wang, Lejin Yang, Yanqiu Xing, Sijing Chen, Yun Kwok Wing, Lin Lu, Xin Ma, Lizhou Fan