arXiv AI

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.

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 AI
Jun 17

Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour

arXiv:2606. 18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time.

By Abeer Badawi, Moyosoreoluwa Olatosi, Negin Baghbanzadeh, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Frank Rudzicz, R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Sara Pishdadian, Elham Dolatabadi
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Gated Activation Steering for Reducing Sycophancy & Hallucination in Medical Question Answering

The paper introduces Gated Activation Steering, an inference-time intervention that jointly mitigates hallucination and sycophancy in medical question answering. By learning separate steering directions from contrastive clinical pairs and applying them to specific attention heads, the method uses behavior‑specific gates to intervene only when needed. Experiments on EHR‑based clinical questions show that the 4‑billion‑parameter model with gated steering outperforms its unsteered counterpart and rivals larger models in resisting user pressure.

By Himanshu Tripathi, Subash Neupane, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Shahram Rahimi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 28

Cognitive World Models for Process-Level Social Influence Evaluation

Social influence dialogue changes user behavior by altering internal cognitive states. The central evaluation question is whether the user's beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions measurably change over the course of conversation, a process-oriented criterion that neither surface-level text metrics (BLEU/ROUGE) nor single-score LLM judgments can capture.

arXiv AI
3d ago

FIGS: Evaluating Multi-Turn Sycophancy Without Penalizing Empathy

The paper introduces FIGS, a dual‑axis evaluation framework for multi‑turn sycophancy that avoids penalizing empathy. It uses a 10‑turn conversational simulator with 500 diverse scenarios to test whether models stay truthful while keeping praise proportional, and whether they show calibrated validation of user feelings. The study finds that current models either drift toward sycophancy or become overly detached, highlighting an unresolved trade‑off in sustained dialogue.

By Sidharth Pulipaka, Ruta Binkyte, Ivaxi Sheth, Sahar Abdelnabi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Moral Sensitivity in LLMs: A Tiered Evaluation of Contextual Bias via Behavioral Profiling and Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.

By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur