arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Steering the Compass: Aligning Dynamic Psychological Counseling Conversations with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Strategies

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.

By Zimu Wang, Yiwen Jiang, Xiangyu Zhao, Yaling Shen, Jiahe Liu, Stephanie Fong, Maxmartwell H Cheng, Guilherme C Oliveira, Anh Nguyen, Robert Desimone, Barnaby Nelson, Dominic Dwyer, Zongyuan Ge
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 6

ODRA: Synthesizing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Sessions with Structured Chain-Of-Thought and Dynamic Patient Resistance

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.

By Javier Rodriguez-Juan, Hiba Arnaout, Jose Garcia-Rodriguez, David Tom\'as, Iryna Gurevych
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
Jul 7

Where do LLMs Fall Short in CBT-Guided Affective Reasoning?

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.

By Vaishnavi Sinha, Pooja Guttal, Pranay Deep Reddy Katike, Vishal Sinha, Gerald Ndawula, Lira Yoon, Andrea Kleinsmith, Manas Gaur
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Graph2Counsel: Clinically Grounded Synthetic Counseling Dialogue Generation from Client Psychological Graphs

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