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
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.
By Aishik Mandal, Hiba Arnaout, Clarissa W. Ong, Juliet Bockhorst, Kate Sheehan, Rachael Moldow, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv:2608. 12750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based simulated clients are increasingly used to train novice counselors, evaluate LLM therapists, and generate synthetic data.
By Sahand Sabour, TszYam NG, Yaqian Chen, Guanqun Bi, Jialu Zhao, Minlie Huang
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...
By Qi Zhang, Heajun An, Prakriti Dumaru, Sang Won Lee, Lifu Huang, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Jin-Hee Cho
arXiv:2608. 12062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Developing dialogue systems capable of engaging in multi-turn, goal-oriented conversations remains a significant challenge, especially in specialized domains with limited data.
By Lior Baruch, Moshe Butman, Kfir Bar, Doron Friedman
The paper introduces a three-tier persona vector for user simulation in evaluating LLM agents, comprising 23 dimensions across demographics, behavioral traits, and emotional states, plus a query-complexity overlay. It demonstrates that these nuanced personas generate diverse, scenario-reactive conversations, leading to significant variations in agent goal achievement and compliance across different contexts. The model’s design allows for reproducible, auditable user behavior patterns without relying on learned covariance matrices.
By Rahul Khedar, Eshita, Sneha Teja Sree Reddy Thondapu, Mayank Malhotra, Arup Kumar Das, Jitesh Chandra Mishra, Arun Menon, Avinash Karn, Mouli V