From Generic Empathy to Personalized Emotional Support: A Self-Evolution Framework for User Preference Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ye, Jing, Xiang, Lu, Zhang, Yaping, Zong, Chengqing
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ye, Jing
Xiang, Lu
Zhang, Yaping
Zong, Chengqing
author_facet Ye, Jing
Xiang, Lu
Zhang, Yaping
Zong, Chengqing
contents Effective emotional support hinges on understanding users' emotions and needs to provide meaningful comfort during multi-turn interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential for expressing empathy; however, they often deliver generic and one-size-fits-all responses that fail to address users' specific needs. To tackle this issue, we propose a self-evolution framework designed to help LLMs improve their responses to better align with users' implicit preferences concerning user profiles (personalities), emotional states, and specific situations. Our framework consists of two distinct phases: \textit{(1)} \textit{Emotional Support Experience Acquisition}, where LLMs are fine-tuned on limited emotional support conversation data to provide basic support, and \textit{(2)} \textit{Self-Improvement for Personalized Emotional Support}, where LLMs leverage self-reflection and self-refinement to generate personalized responses. Through iterative direct preference optimization between the pre- and post-refined responses, our model generates responses that reflect a better understanding of the user's implicit preferences. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the model's performance in emotional support, reducing unhelpful responses and minimizing discrepancies between user preferences and model outputs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_16610
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Generic Empathy to Personalized Emotional Support: A Self-Evolution Framework for User Preference Alignment
Ye, Jing
Xiang, Lu
Zhang, Yaping
Zong, Chengqing
Computation and Language
Effective emotional support hinges on understanding users' emotions and needs to provide meaningful comfort during multi-turn interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential for expressing empathy; however, they often deliver generic and one-size-fits-all responses that fail to address users' specific needs. To tackle this issue, we propose a self-evolution framework designed to help LLMs improve their responses to better align with users' implicit preferences concerning user profiles (personalities), emotional states, and specific situations. Our framework consists of two distinct phases: \textit{(1)} \textit{Emotional Support Experience Acquisition}, where LLMs are fine-tuned on limited emotional support conversation data to provide basic support, and \textit{(2)} \textit{Self-Improvement for Personalized Emotional Support}, where LLMs leverage self-reflection and self-refinement to generate personalized responses. Through iterative direct preference optimization between the pre- and post-refined responses, our model generates responses that reflect a better understanding of the user's implicit preferences. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the model's performance in emotional support, reducing unhelpful responses and minimizing discrepancies between user preferences and model outputs.
title From Generic Empathy to Personalized Emotional Support: A Self-Evolution Framework for User Preference Alignment
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16610