arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

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.

By Aishik Mandal, Hiba Arnaout, Clarissa W. Ong, Juliet Bockhorst, Kate Sheehan, Rachael Moldow, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT): Structured Multimodal Reasoning about Social Situations

The paper introduces Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a structured reasoning framework for vision‑language models that divides multimodal social reasoning into three cognitively inspired stages: Perception, Situation, and Norm. CoCoT improves performance across diverse tasks—multimodal intent disambiguation, theory of mind, social commonsense reasoning, and safety instruction following—by 5.9% to 4.6% on average. Fine‑tuning on CoCoT‑structured traces further boosts accuracy by 5–6% without explicit prompting, indicating that models internalize the structured reasoning pattern and that the approach enhances interpretability and social alignment in multimodal systems.

By Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Gunhee Kim, Motahhare Eslami, Maarten Sap
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