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.
arXiv:2510.25384v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising tools for synthetic data generation in mental health. However, privacy policies and restrictions forced...
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...
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.
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.
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:2601.10085v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conversational dynamics describe how rapport, emotion, and goals change over a dialogue. These changes are important in therapeutic conversations,...
BiGraph-Diffuse is a large‑scale diffusion language model designed for mental health counseling, addressing two key limitations of existing AI dialogue systems: the lack of bidirectional understanding for progressive disclosure and the inadequate use of relational clinical knowledge. It pairs this diffusion model with BiGraph‑RAG, a graph‑structured retrieval approach that uses lightweight entity extraction and semantic linking to preserve inferential pathways from symptoms to underlying causes without incurring LLM token costs during indexing. Experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of this mutually reinforcing architecture.
The study presents a pipeline that uses large language models to automatically generate personalized client networks from therapy session transcripts, aiming to aid case conceptualization and treatment planning. Researchers annotated 8,028 utterances from 77 transcripts, then used binary and multi-label classification to identify clinically relevant processes and dimensions, clustered these processes, and generated connections between clusters. Evaluation showed general support for the model’s utility, though interrater agreement varied, and qualitative analysis indicated the networks were coherent and interpretable, suggesting feasibility while highlighting the need for further research on outcome improvement.
arXiv:2607.23648v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using large language models (LLMs) to assist psychological counseling is an important task in the field of natural language processing. The constru...
The paper investigates the role of minimal responses—short, empathic utterances—in psychological counseling, noting that such brief replies are common in human dialogues but underrepresented in large language model (LLM) outputs. Using a two‑stage filtering approach and contextual verification with an LLM, the authors systematically analyze minimal responses across multiple counseling datasets. They find that while strong commercial LLMs can produce minimal replies when prompted, they often fail to judge when these replies are appropriate, and counseling‑specific models trained on synthetic data tend to generate longer, content‑rich responses instead.
arXiv:2608.21925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems aim to provide holistic support by balancing professional therapeutic competence with natural empathy. How...
arXiv:2610.08250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to simulate clients for counselor training and psychological counseling research, but reliable simulation r...