Towards a Client-Centered Assessment of LLM Therapists by Client Simulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Jiashuo, Xiao, Yang, Li, Yanran, Song, Changhe, Xu, Chunpu, Tan, Chenhao, Li, Wenjie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wang, Jiashuo
Xiao, Yang
Li, Yanran
Song, Changhe
Xu, Chunpu
Tan, Chenhao
Li, Wenjie
author_facet Wang, Jiashuo
Xiao, Yang
Li, Yanran
Song, Changhe
Xu, Chunpu
Tan, Chenhao
Li, Wenjie
contents Although there is a growing belief that LLMs can be used as therapists, exploring LLMs' capabilities and inefficacy, particularly from the client's perspective, is limited. This work focuses on a client-centered assessment of LLM therapists with the involvement of simulated clients, a standard approach in clinical medical education. However, there are two challenges when applying the approach to assess LLM therapists at scale. Ethically, asking humans to frequently mimic clients and exposing them to potentially harmful LLM outputs can be risky and unsafe. Technically, it can be difficult to consistently compare the performances of different LLM therapists interacting with the same client. To this end, we adopt LLMs to simulate clients and propose ClientCAST, a client-centered approach to assessing LLM therapists by client simulation. Specifically, the simulated client is utilized to interact with LLM therapists and complete questionnaires related to the interaction. Based on the questionnaire results, we assess LLM therapists from three client-centered aspects: session outcome, therapeutic alliance, and self-reported feelings. We conduct experiments to examine the reliability of ClientCAST and use it to evaluate LLMs therapists implemented by Claude-3, GPT-3.5, LLaMA3-70B, and Mixtral 8*7B. Codes are released at https://github.com/wangjs9/ClientCAST.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12266
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a Client-Centered Assessment of LLM Therapists by Client Simulation
Wang, Jiashuo
Xiao, Yang
Li, Yanran
Song, Changhe
Xu, Chunpu
Tan, Chenhao
Li, Wenjie
Computation and Language
Although there is a growing belief that LLMs can be used as therapists, exploring LLMs' capabilities and inefficacy, particularly from the client's perspective, is limited. This work focuses on a client-centered assessment of LLM therapists with the involvement of simulated clients, a standard approach in clinical medical education. However, there are two challenges when applying the approach to assess LLM therapists at scale. Ethically, asking humans to frequently mimic clients and exposing them to potentially harmful LLM outputs can be risky and unsafe. Technically, it can be difficult to consistently compare the performances of different LLM therapists interacting with the same client. To this end, we adopt LLMs to simulate clients and propose ClientCAST, a client-centered approach to assessing LLM therapists by client simulation. Specifically, the simulated client is utilized to interact with LLM therapists and complete questionnaires related to the interaction. Based on the questionnaire results, we assess LLM therapists from three client-centered aspects: session outcome, therapeutic alliance, and self-reported feelings. We conduct experiments to examine the reliability of ClientCAST and use it to evaluate LLMs therapists implemented by Claude-3, GPT-3.5, LLaMA3-70B, and Mixtral 8*7B. Codes are released at https://github.com/wangjs9/ClientCAST.
title Towards a Client-Centered Assessment of LLM Therapists by Client Simulation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12266