MAGneT: Coordinated Multi-Agent Generation of Synthetic Multi-Turn Mental Health Counseling Sessions

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Mandal, Aishik, Chakraborty, Tanmoy, Gurevych, Iryna
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866915717711921152
author Mandal, Aishik
Chakraborty, Tanmoy
Gurevych, Iryna
author_facet Mandal, Aishik
Chakraborty, Tanmoy
Gurevych, Iryna
contents The growing demand for scalable psychological counseling highlights the need for high-quality, privacy-compliant data, yet such data remains scarce. Here we introduce MAGneT, a novel multi-agent framework for synthetic psychological counseling session generation that decomposes counselor response generation into coordinated sub-tasks handled by specialized LLM agents, each modeling a key psychological technique. Unlike prior single-agent approaches, MAGneT better captures the structure and nuance of real counseling. We further propose a unified evaluation framework that consolidates diverse automatic metrics and expands expert assessment from four to nine counseling dimensions, thus addressing inconsistencies in prior evaluation protocols. Empirically, MAGneT substantially outperforms existing methods: experts prefer MAGneT-generated sessions in 77.2% of cases, and sessions generated by MAGneT yield 3.2% higher general counseling skills and 4.3% higher CBT-specific skills on cognitive therapy rating scale (CTRS). A open source Llama3-8B-Instruct model fine-tuned on MAGneT-generated data also outperforms models fine-tuned using baseline synthetic datasets by 6.9% on average on CTRS.We also make our code and data public.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04183
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MAGneT: Coordinated Multi-Agent Generation of Synthetic Multi-Turn Mental Health Counseling Sessions
Mandal, Aishik
Chakraborty, Tanmoy
Gurevych, Iryna
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The growing demand for scalable psychological counseling highlights the need for high-quality, privacy-compliant data, yet such data remains scarce. Here we introduce MAGneT, a novel multi-agent framework for synthetic psychological counseling session generation that decomposes counselor response generation into coordinated sub-tasks handled by specialized LLM agents, each modeling a key psychological technique. Unlike prior single-agent approaches, MAGneT better captures the structure and nuance of real counseling. We further propose a unified evaluation framework that consolidates diverse automatic metrics and expands expert assessment from four to nine counseling dimensions, thus addressing inconsistencies in prior evaluation protocols. Empirically, MAGneT substantially outperforms existing methods: experts prefer MAGneT-generated sessions in 77.2% of cases, and sessions generated by MAGneT yield 3.2% higher general counseling skills and 4.3% higher CBT-specific skills on cognitive therapy rating scale (CTRS). A open source Llama3-8B-Instruct model fine-tuned on MAGneT-generated data also outperforms models fine-tuned using baseline synthetic datasets by 6.9% on average on CTRS.We also make our code and data public.
title MAGneT: Coordinated Multi-Agent Generation of Synthetic Multi-Turn Mental Health Counseling Sessions
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04183