The paper introduces RESCUE-BENCH, a benchmark for relation-aware multi‑party emotional support conversation systems. It is built from real couple and family interview data, comprising 191 samples, 7,079 annotated turns, and 1,064.8 minutes of video, and defines six tasks that assess relational understanding and relation‑sensitive support. Experiments with ten large language models show that while they handle local emotional cues reasonably well, they struggle with tasks that require modeling interpersonal relations, such as predicting relation patterns, viewpoints, and support strategies.
By Haichuan Hu, Yang Xiao, Mingni Tang, Jiawen Duan, Quanjun Zhang, Congqing He, Hao Zhang, Jiashuo Wang, Johan F. Hoorn, Wenjie Li
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support, raising concern that sustained use may draw users away from their real-world relationships. Yet existing evaluations primarily...
The study evaluates PAIR, a theory-based emotion‑regulation companion, over 14 days with 19 participants, analyzing 1,093 sessions. Emotion estimates from the agent aligned better with participants’ self‑reported valence and dominance than arousal, and guided conversations led to higher valence and state‑dependent arousal changes. Participants reported feeling understood, and the perceived helpfulness of guided conversations increased over time, highlighting the role of memory updates and cross‑session personalization in sustained emotional support.
By Kexin Quan, Zijian Ding, Jiaye Yong, Qinshi Zhang, Dong Wang, Jessie Chin
arXiv:2608.13168v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied for emotional companionship, evaluating their behavior and capabilities in intimate relati...
By Junkai Zhou, Shiting Guan, Zhaoyi Zhang
arXiv:2504. 11837v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations.
By Yue Zhao, Qingqing Gu, Xiaoyu Wang, Teng Chen, Zhonglin Jiang, Yong Chen, Hongyan Li, Luo Ji
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...
By Kaitong Weng, Lixin Liu, Zihao Liu, Bo Wang, Shiguang Ni
arXiv:2610.09569v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support, raising concern that sustained use may draw users away from their real-world...
By Shivam Shukla, Jihye Kim, Shubham Gaur, Mahnaz Roshanaei, Magy Seif El-Nasr
The paper introduces the COmmunity-centered Peer Engaged Support (COPES) dataset and a three‑axis evaluation framework to gauge how well Large Language Models (LLMs) align with community perspectives on mental‑health support queries. Experiments show that fine‑tuning LLMs on COPES improves strategy alignment and emotion‑tone alignment by over 50% for general‑purpose models, yet these gains are uneven across subreddits and coping strategies. The study also finds that post‑training shifts the model’s recommendations toward problem‑focused advice while reducing emotion‑focused responses, indicating persistent disparities in performance across different communities and needs.
By Mohit Chandra, Nabin Kim, Eli Min, Aamogh Sawant, Tanmay Sutar, Munmun De Choudhury
Humans possess an innate ability to understand fine-grained interpersonal relationships, which is central to everyday social interactions. Although such reasoning is inherently multimodal, it remains largely unexplored by existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
arXiv:2607. 28648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support tasks, such as negative thought reframing.
By Hainiu Xu, Zhaoyue Sun, Hanqi Yan, Jinhua Du, Caroline Catmur, Yulan He
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...
By Weichu Liu, Yuxuan Hu, Yirong Sun, Ningning Mao, Ziyun Zhang, Jian Chen, Mingyang Xu, Qishan Zhong, Chengming Li
PIVOTSBench is a benchmark designed to assess multimodal large language models’ ability to reason about fine‑grained interpersonal relationships. It is constructed from Social‑IQ 2.0 and YouTube data and evaluates models on predicting bidirectional relationship dimensions grounded in psychology research. The benchmark also includes auxiliary tasks that test models’ capacity to identify and use critical visual cues, and it examines the impact of visual modalities, social role information, and different prediction settings on model performance.
By Shuxiang Zhang, Yiting Yin, Wenxuan Song, Yuhang Wu, Miao Liu