DELTA: Deliberative Multi-Agent Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Psychological Counseling

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Yang, Jiangnan, Chen, Junjie, Wang, Fei, Nie, Yiqi, Liu, Yuxin, Duan, Zhangling, Chen, Jie
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Yang, Jiangnan
Chen, Junjie
Wang, Fei
Nie, Yiqi
Liu, Yuxin
Duan, Zhangling
Chen, Jie
author_facet Yang, Jiangnan
Chen, Junjie
Wang, Fei
Nie, Yiqi
Liu, Yuxin
Duan, Zhangling
Chen, Jie
contents Psychological counseling is a fundamentally multimodal cognitive process in which clinicians integrate verbal content with visual and vocal cues to infer clients' mental states and respond empathically. However, most existing language-model-based counseling systems operate on text alone and rely on implicit mental state inference. We introduce DELTA, a deliberative multi-agent framework that models counseling as a structured reasoning process over multimodal signals, separating evidence grounding, mental state abstraction, and response generation. DELTA further incorporates reinforcement learning guided by a distribution-level Emotion Attunement Score to encourage emotionally attuned responses. Experiments on a multimodal counseling benchmark show that DELTA improves both counseling quality and emotion attunement across models. Ablation and qualitative analyses suggest that explicit multimodal reasoning and structured mental state representations play complementary roles in supporting empathic human-AI interaction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DELTA: Deliberative Multi-Agent Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Psychological Counseling
Yang, Jiangnan
Chen, Junjie
Wang, Fei
Nie, Yiqi
Liu, Yuxin
Duan, Zhangling
Chen, Jie
Computation and Language
Psychological counseling is a fundamentally multimodal cognitive process in which clinicians integrate verbal content with visual and vocal cues to infer clients' mental states and respond empathically. However, most existing language-model-based counseling systems operate on text alone and rely on implicit mental state inference. We introduce DELTA, a deliberative multi-agent framework that models counseling as a structured reasoning process over multimodal signals, separating evidence grounding, mental state abstraction, and response generation. DELTA further incorporates reinforcement learning guided by a distribution-level Emotion Attunement Score to encourage emotionally attuned responses. Experiments on a multimodal counseling benchmark show that DELTA improves both counseling quality and emotion attunement across models. Ablation and qualitative analyses suggest that explicit multimodal reasoning and structured mental state representations play complementary roles in supporting empathic human-AI interaction.
title DELTA: Deliberative Multi-Agent Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Psychological Counseling
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04112