Psychological Counseling Cannot Be Achieved Overnight: Automated Psychological Counseling Through Multi-Session Conversations
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in automated psychological counseling.However, current research focuses on single-session counseling, which fails to capture the ongoing nature of real-world counseling processes.Effective counseling is not a one-time interaction but an ongoing process, where each session builds upon the last to progressively address a client's issues.To overcome this limitation, we introduce a dataset for Multi-Session Psychological Counseling Conversation Dataset (MusPsy-Dataset).Due to the sensitive nature of counseling and inherent privacy concerns, we construct this synthetic dataset from authoritative, publicly available psychological case reports.The MusPsy-Dataset is designed to reflect the temporal continuity and shifting mental states of a single client across multiple sessions.Leveraging this resource, we propose the MusPsy-Model, which tracks client progress and dynamically adjusts counseling goals over time.Experiments show that our model performs better than baseline models across multiple sessions.
Institution: Harbin Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Applied Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Award: G796335958
OpenAlex ID: W7166844339