Steering the Compass: Aligning Dynamic Psychological Counseling Conversations with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Strategies

arXiv:2609.20565 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-17 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-17

Updated: 2026-09-17

Comments: Accepted at EMNLP 2026

Code: https://github.com/zimuwangnlp/StratCBT

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — 13× in this paper
• Bradley-Terry model — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 4× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Semantic Similarity — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Actor — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Alignment — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Steering — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adversarial Examples — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale — 1× in this paper
• Cosine Similarity — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Interpretability — 1× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Iterative Refinement — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 11 episodes
• Pairwise Comparisons — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Representation Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Mixed Chain-of-Psychotherapies for Emotional Support Chatbot
• Enhancing Psychological Counseling with Large Language Model: A Multifaceted Decision-Support System for Non-Professionals
• Therapy as an NLP Task: Comparing LLMs and Human Peers Behaviors in CBT Sessions
• GPT-4o System Card
• When does In-context Learning Fall Short and Why? A Study on Specification-Heavy Tasks
• Multiview Contextual Commonsense Inference: A New Dataset and Task
• Do No Harm: Exposing Hidden Vulnerabilities of LLMs via Persona-based Client Simulation Attack in Psychological Counseling
• It Hears, It Sees too: Multi-Modal LLM for Depression Detection By Integrating Visual Understanding into Audio Language Models

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