He Hu, Juzheng Si, Qianning Wang, Fei Ma, Fuji Ren, Sicheng Zhao, Yucheng Zhou, Laizhong Cui
Large language models (LLMs) hold significant potential for psychological support, capable of generating empathetic responses and simulating therapeutic conversations. However, existing LLM-based approaches often lack sufficient grounding in structured diagnostic reasoning and diverse therapeutic strategies, limiting their effectiveness in complex counseling scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose PsyLLM, the first large language model designed to incorporate diagnostic- and therapeutic-oriented reasoning for mental health counseling. To develop PsyLLM, we design a novel automated data synthesis pipeline that processes real-world mental health posts collected from Reddit, where users frequently express psychological distress and seek community support. The pipeline transforms these posts into multi-turn counseling dialogues and leverages LLMs guided by international diagnostic standards (e.g., DSM/ICD) and multiple therapeutic frameworks (e.g., CBT, ACT, psychodynamic) to generate structured, clinically informed reasoning traces. A rigorous multi-dimensional filtering mechanism further improves the quality and clinical fidelity of the synthesized dialogue data. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark and evaluation protocol, assessing counseling performance across four key dimensions. Our experiments, along with evaluations by professional counseling experts, demonstrate that PsyLLM consistently outperforms various baseline models on this benchmark. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/Emo-gml/PsyLLM.
Wentao Zhang, Yan Zhuang Tencent, ZhuHang Zheng, Mingfei Zhang, Jiawen Deng University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Fuji Ren University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Existing jamming attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically induce explicit refusals or denial-of-service behaviors, which are conspicuous and easy to detect. In this work, we formalize a subtler availability threat, termed soft failure, which degrades system utility by inducing fluent and coherent yet non-informative responses rather than overt failures. We propose Deceptive Evolutionary Jamming Attack (DEJA), an automated black-box attack framework that generates adversarial documents to trigger such soft failures by exploiting safety-aligned behaviors of large language models. DEJA employs an evolutionary optimization process guided by a fine-grained Answer Utility Score (AUS), computed via an LLM-based evaluator, to systematically undermine the certainty of answers while maintaining high retrieval success.Extensive experiments across multiple RAG configurations and benchmark datasets show that DEJA consistently drives responses toward low-utility soft failures and that the resulting adversarial documents maintain high stealth and effectiveness, proving resilient against common mitigation strategies including perplexity-based detection and input perturbations.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jiawen Deng University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Wei Li, Wentao Zhang, Ziyun Jiao, Fuji Ren University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Intelligent dialogue systems are increasingly deployed in emotionally and ethically sensitive settings, where failures in either emotional attunement or ethical judgment can cause significant harm. Existing dialogue models typically address empathy and ethical safety in isolation, and often fail to adapt their behavior as ethical risk and user emotion evolve across multi-turn interactions. We formulate ethical-emotional alignment in dialogue as an explicit turn-level decision problem, and propose EthicMind, a risk-aware framework that implements this formulation in multi-turn dialogue at inference time. At each turn, EthicMind jointly analyzes ethical risk signals and user emotion, plans a high-level response strategy, and generates context-sensitive replies that balance ethical guidance with emotional engagement, without requiring additional model training. To evaluate alignment behavior under ethically complex interactions, we introduce a risk-stratified, multi-turn evaluation protocol with a context-aware user simulation procedure. Experimental results show that EthicMind achieves more consistent ethical guidance and emotional engagement than competitive baselines, particularly in high-risk and morally ambiguous scenarios.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表