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Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactions

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arxiv 2408.15787 v2 pith:XVFTWPZY submitted 2024-08-28 cs.CL cs.IR

classification cs.CLcs.IR
keywords counselingframeworkdialogueagentagentscounselor-clientdatadialogues
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

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Creating effective dialogue systems for mental health support requires high-quality multi-turn counseling dialogue data, yet collecting real counselor-client conversations presents significant challenges, including privacy concerns, high costs, and limited scalability. We present \textbf{Interactive Agents}, a novel framework that simulates naturalistic counseling dialogues through controlled LLM-to-LLM interactions. The framework introduces two key innovations: (1) a personalized client agent that maintains consistent psychological characteristics throughout a session, and (2) a counselor agent that implements a theoretically grounded three-stage therapeutic model comprising the exploration, insight, and action phases. Through rigorous evaluation using both automatic metrics and professional-counselor assessments based on the Working Alliance Inventory, we demonstrate that our framework generates therapeutically valid dialogues that are comparable in quality to human-generated sessions. Models fine-tuned on our proposed synthetic dataset (SimPsyDial) achieve state-of-the-art performance in a standard pairwise chatbot-arena evaluation of LLM-based counselors. Our framework provides a scalable, privacy-preserving method for generating high-quality counseling dialogue data while maintaining professional therapeutic standards.

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Forward citations

Cited by 15 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

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  6. Enhancing User Engagement in Socially-Driven Dialogue through Interactive LLM Alignments

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Dialogue agents aligned via DPO on preference pairs mined from simulated conversations improve engagement scores against the same simulator, with smaller and partially inconsistent human evaluation evidence.

  7. Psychological Counseling Cannot Be Achieved Overnight: Automated Psychological Counseling Through Multi-Session Conversations

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

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    A dialogue-strategy-trained patient simulator improves realism in AI medical consultations and shows that inquiry quality and diagnostic skill jointly limit diagnostic accuracy.

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