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...
By Zainab Iftikhar, Sean Ransom, Amy Xiao, Nicole Nugent, Jeff Huang
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: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
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
arXiv:2606. 29495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social influence dialogue changes user behavior by altering internal cognitive states.
By Minghui Ma, Bin Guo, Han Wang, Mengqi Chen, Jingqi Liu, Yan Liu, Zhiwen Yu
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:2608.23028v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in education, healthcare, policy advising, and other interactive settings, where users engage th...
By Zeyu Feng, Qingyu Wu, Yuzhe Luo, Hua Cheng
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:2607. 14109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central challenges in natural language understanding.
By Inder Preet, Shuxin Lin, Dhaval Patel
arXiv:2607. 25681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive distortion amplifies negative emotions and contributes to mental health disorders.
By Qi Chen, Siria Xiyueyao Luo, Jian Wang, Yuan Shi, Haocong Rao, Xuejiao Zhao
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
arXiv:2603.03677v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Psychiatric consultation requires agents to elicit discriminative evidence, map uncertain narratives to diagnostic criteria, and decide when...
By Guoyi Li, Shihao Xu, Jiatong Ma, Zhongjiang Yao, Yunyun Han, Jianhua Chen, Yafeng Deng