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
arXiv:2606. 17441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies.
By Moritz Schlager, Friederike Jungmann, Samuel Schmidgall, Philipp Raffler, Franziska Hartl, Eva Wende, Paula Ro{\ss}m\"uller, Conrad Ketzer, Avinatan Hassidim, Dale R. Webster, Yossi Matias, Yun Liu, Daniel Rueckert, Mike Schaekermann, Paul Hager
arXiv:2608. 07499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development and benchmarking of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Motivational Interviewing (MI) counsellors now often rely on LLM-based simulated clients.
By Jiading Zhu, Xinyu Cindy Wang, Thomas Nguyen, Yan Qing Lee, Osnat C. Melamed, Peter Selby, Jonathan Rose
Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in psychological counseling, yet existing benchmarks rely heavily on highly cooperative simulated clients. We observe a critical counselor-following phenomenon: these clients often rapidly shift from resistance to compliance after only a few turns, creating an illusion of therapeutic progress and inflating scores under current evaluation protocols through superficial empathy.
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:2606. 14199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation.
By Xuhui Zhou, Weiwei Sun, Weihua Du, Jiarui Liu, Haojia Sun, Qianou Ma, Tongshuang Wu, Yiming Yang, Maarten Sap