arXiv Computation and Language

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Roleplaying with Structure: Synthetic Therapist-Client Conversation Generation from Questionnaires

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...

By Doan Nam Long Vu, Rui Tan, Lena Moench, Svenja Jule Francke, Daniel Woiwod, Florian Thomas-Odenthal, Sanna Stroth, Tilo Kircher, Christiane Hermann, Udo Dannlowski, Hamidreza Jamalabadi, Simone Balloccu, Shaoxiong Ji
arXiv AI
Aug 26

When Less Is More: An Empirical Study of Minimal Responses in Counseling Dialogues and the Behavior of LLMs

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.

By Zhiyang Qi
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Training Therapeutic Judges and Multi-Agent Systems for Human-Aligned Mental Health Support

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.

By Mizanur Rahman, Abeer Badawi, Elahe Rahimi, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Frank Rudzicz, Enamul Hoque, Elham Dolatabadi
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