The paper introduces MindEth-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess whether large language models (LLMs) maintain professional ethical boundaries during multi‑turn mental health interactions in China. It uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to generate challenging dialogue trajectories and evaluates nine LLMs, finding that models can shift from appropriate to unethical responses over time. The study demonstrates that single‑turn tests may overestimate ethical reliability, underscoring the need for comprehensive multi‑turn evaluation.
By Bichen Wang, Yufeng Jin, Yixin Sun, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin
arXiv:2603. 00048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive applications including psychological support, healthcare, and high-stakes decision-making.
By Erica Coppolillo, Emilio Ferrara
PsyCLIENT is a framework that uses large language models to simulate counseling clients by conditioning responses on client profiles, dialogue histories, and conversational trajectories that specify target behaviors and content constraints. The authors created PsyCLIENT-CP, a dataset of 120 Chinese client profiles covering 60 counseling topics, and evaluated the system with 24 professional counselors, finding higher authenticity and training utility ratings compared to baseline methods. In a source-identification study, PsyCLIENT-generated dialogues were more often mistaken for real human-client interactions than those from other models, indicating the effectiveness of conversational trajectory modeling in producing realistic counseling conversations.
By Huachuan Qiu, Zhaoming Chen, Yuqian Chen, Yuan Xie, Yu Lu, Zhenzhong Lan
APRiL is an open‑ended benchmark designed to evaluate Chinese large language models’ social awareness. It comprises 2,196 evaluation instances across six categories, split into two tasks: Social Scenario Analysis, which tests understanding of social cues, mental states, and conflict structures, and Socially Aware Response, which checks whether models can generate appropriate, natural replies. Experiments on twelve models from six families show a consistent gap between understanding and response quality, indicating that stronger scenario analyses tend to improve response performance.
By Tian Lan, Han Zhang, Shanshan Wang, Yahan Yu, Jiang Li, Yugo Murawaki
VEILED‑SH is a new benchmark for evaluating AI responses to indirect expressions of suicide, self‑harm, and distress. It contains 10,003 prompts drawn from counselor chats, forum posts, platform searches, and triage, all grounded in Singaporean contexts and public datasets. The dataset uses an expert‑validated multi‑label taxonomy to classify intent, communicative function, and response behavior, and it includes six automated profiles calibrated to peer‑support practitioners and clinicians for proxy‑alignment scoring.
By Leanne Tan, Keith Chua, Shaun Khoo, Onno P. Kampman, Lim Ruling Charmaine, Hazirah Hoosainsah, Kellie Yu Hui Sim, Kai He, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
arXiv:2607. 10871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contemplative traditions have long guided ethical behavior and prosocial interaction, and recent work suggests that contemplative principles (e.
By Asher Sprigler, Yang-Yang Feng, Iftach Amir, Jonathan E. Bogard, Todd S Braver, Yi Ding, David Kinney, Yixue Zhao
arXiv:2609.15855v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: % !TEX root = ../main.tex People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) for mental health support, yet their safety in evolving, high-risk con...
By Laura M. Vowels, Matthew J. Vowels, Shivali Sharma, Apoorv Jha, Rehnuma Choudhury, Wasseem El Sarraj, Rachel Francois-Walcott, Aruba Hussain, Sarah Ingram, Angela Loulopoulou, Adva Segal, Elena Volkova
arXiv:2601.13235v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Caregivers seeking AI-mediated support express complex needs---information-seeking, emotional validation, and distress cues---that warrant ca...
By Drishti Goel, Jeongah Lee, Qiuyue Joy Zhong, Violeta J. Rodriguez, Daniel S. Brown, Ravi Karkar, Dong Whi Yoo, Koustuv Saha
How can we evaluate whether frontier AI systems recognize child-safety risks before they escalate into explicit harm? Existing child safety evaluations focus on child sexual abuse material, yet many child-safety failures begin earlier: in model assistance that helps adults manipulate, impersonate, profile, or isolate minors, and in model responses that deepen children's emotional dependence on AI systems rather than redirecting them toward human support.
arXiv:2606. 29685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How can we evaluate whether frontier AI systems recognize child-safety risks before they escalate into explicit harm?
By Kaavya Krishna-Kumar, Elaine Lau, Vaughn Robinson, Jay Caldwell, Sheriff Issaka, Skyler Wang, Francisco Guzm\'an, Steven Kelling, Jonas Mueller
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.
By John Mendon\c{c}a, Daniel Tschernutter, Jos\'e Pombal, Areti Vassilopoulos, Catarina Botelho, Ignacio Sarasua, Maya D'Eon, Nuno Guerreiro, Ricardo Rei
arXiv:2607. 24754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide mental health support, requiring reliable evaluation of safety, empathy, and therapeutic appropriateness.
By Asher Sprigler, Yixue Zhao, Yi Ding