arXiv:2608. 04524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic generation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) sessions is challenged by two competing demands: adhering to strict therapeutic structure while modeling the resistant, unpredictable behavior of real patients.
arXiv:2608. 12750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based simulated clients are increasingly used to train novice counselors, evaluate LLM therapists, and generate synthetic data.
The paper introduces StratCBT, a new dataset of 9,688 psychological counseling sessions with 256K utterances, each counselor response aligned to one of eight Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) strategies. It was created by modeling clients’ negative thoughts and generating high‑quality conversations through self‑chat, using realistic sessions for guidance. Experiments show that strategy‑aligned generation improves professional and effective counseling when evaluated with large language model‑simulated clients.
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.
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.
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...
Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in psychological counseling, yet existing benchmarks rely heavily on highly cooperative simulated clients. We observe a critical counselor-following phenomenon: these clients often rapidly shift from resistance to compliance after only a few turns, creating an illusion of therapeutic progress and inflating scores under current evaluation protocols through superficial empathy.
ClinicalReTrial is a multi‑agent AI system that treats clinical trial protocol optimization as an iterative redesign problem on textual documents. It combines failure diagnosis, safety‑aware modifications, and candidate evaluation within a closed‑loop, reward‑driven framework, using a predictive model as a simulation environment for low‑cost, dense feedback. The system achieves a 56.7% conversion of failed protocols to predicted successes, with a 7.4% average success probability increase at a negligible cost, and its redesign patterns align with real‑world expert changes.
arXiv:2607. 02885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) provides a structured framework for understanding a user's mental state by examining the interaction between cognitive and behavioral factors.
arXiv:2509.04183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The growing demand for scalable psychological counseling highlights the need for high-quality, privacy-compliant data, yet such data remains...
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.
The paper introduces STaR-CS, a method that generates multi‑party dialogues by modeling facilitator style and extracting structured skeletons, thereby easing data scarcity for cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) in low‑resource languages. Building on this corpus, the Reflective Cognitive Alignment (RCA) framework treats stimulation interactions as a sequential decision process, combining Protocol‑Constrained Chain‑of‑Cognition (PC‑CoC) for structured reasoning with Inference‑Time Value Alignment (IVA) to select responses that balance safety and engagement. Experiments with six large language models and two judges demonstrate that RCA improves protocol adherence, safety, and group facilitation compared to standard prompting.
arXiv:2409.02244v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used as ad hoc therapists. While prior research has found that LLMs outperform human coun...