Building Trust in Mental Health Chatbots: Safety Metrics and LLM-Based Evaluation Tools

Objective: This study aims to develop and validate an evaluation framework to ensure the safety and reliability of mental health chatbots, which are increasingly popular due to their accessibility, human-like interactions, and context-aware support. Materials and Methods: We created an evaluation framework with 100 benchmark questions and ideal responses, and five guideline questions for chatbot responses. This framework, validated by mental health experts, was tested on a GPT-3.5-turbo-based chatbot. Automated evaluation methods explored included large language model (LLM)-based scoring, an agentic approach using real-time data, and embedding models to compare chatbot responses against ground truth standards. Results: The results highlight the importance of guidelines and ground truth for improving LLM evaluation accuracy. The agentic method, dynamically accessing reliable information, demonstrated the best alignment with human assessments. Adherence to a standardized, expert-validated framework significantly enhanced chatbot response safety and reliability. Discussion: Our findings emphasize the need for comprehensive, expert-tailored safety evaluation metrics for mental health chatbots. While LLMs have significant potential, careful implementation is necessary to mitigate risks. The superior performance of the agentic approach underscores the importance of real-time data access in enhancing chatbot reliability. Conclusion: The study validated an evaluation framework for mental health chatbots, proving its effectiveness in improving safety and reliability. Future work should extend evaluations to accuracy, bias, empathy, and privacy to ensure holistic assessment and responsible integration into healthcare. Standardized evaluations will build trust among users and professionals, facilitating broader adoption and improved mental health support through technology.

Controlling the Latent Space of GANs through Reinforcement Learning: A Case Study on Task-based Image-to-Image Translation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have emerged as a formidable AI tool to generate realistic outputs based on training datasets. However, the challenge of exerting control over the generation process of GANs remains a significant hurdle. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to address this issue by integrating a reinforcement learning (RL) agent with a latent-space GAN (l-GAN), thereby facilitating the generation of desired outputs. More specifically, we have developed an actor-critic RL agent with a meticulously designed reward policy, enabling it to acquire proficiency in navigating the latent space of the l-GAN and generating outputs based on specified tasks. To substantiate the efficacy of our approach, we have conducted a series of experiments employing the MNIST dataset, including arithmetic addition as an illustrative task. The outcomes of these experiments serve to validate our methodology. Our pioneering integration of an RL agent with a GAN model represents a novel advancement, holding great potential for enhancing generative networks in the future.

CART: Collision Avoidance and Robust Tracking Augmentation in Learning-based Motion Planning for Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents CART, an analytical method to augment a learning-based, distributed motion planning policy of a nonlinear multi-agent system with real-time collision avoidance and robust tracking guarantees, independently of learning errors. We first derive an analytical form of an optimal safety filter for Lagrangian systems, which formally ensures a collision-free operation in a multi-agent setting in a disturbance-free environment, while allowing for its distributed implementation with minimal deviation from the learned policy. We then propose an analytical form of an optimal robust filter for Lagrangian systems to be used hierarchically with the learned collision-free target trajectory, which also enables distributed implementation and guarantees exponential boundedness of the trajectory tracking error for safety, even under the presence of deterministic and stochastic disturbance. These results are shown to extend further to general control-affine nonlinear systems using contraction theory. Our key contribution is to enhance the performance of the learned motion planning policy with collision avoidance and tracking-based robustness guarantees, independently of its original performance such as approximation errors and regret bounds in machine learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CART in motion planning and control of several examples of nonlinear systems, including spacecraft formation flying and rotor-failed UAV swarms.

Active Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Stress Monitoring in Everyday Settings

Most existing sensor-based monitoring frameworks presume that a large available labeled dataset is processed to train accurate detection models. However, in settings where personalization is necessary at deployment time to fine-tune the model, a person-specific dataset needs to be collected online by interacting with the users. Optimizing the collection of labels in such phase is instrumental to impose a tolerable burden on the users while maximizing personal improvement. In this paper, we consider a fine-grain stress detection problem based on wearable sensors targeting everyday settings, and propose a novel context-aware active learning strategy capable of jointly maximizing the meaningfulness of the signal samples we request the user to label and the response rate. We develop a multilayered sensor-edge-cloud platform to periodically capture physiological signals and process them in real-time, as well as to collect labels and retrain the detection model. We collect a large dataset and show that the context-aware active learning technique we propose achieves a desirable detection performance using 88\% and 32\% fewer queries from users compared to a randomized strategy and a traditional active learning strategy, respectively.

Objective Prediction of Tomorrow's Affect Using Multi-Modal Physiological Data and Personal Chronicles: A Study of Monitoring College Student Well-being in 2020

Monitoring and understanding affective states are important aspects of healthy functioning and treatment of mood-based disorders. Recent advancements of ubiquitous wearable technologies have increased the reliability of such tools in detecting and accurately estimating mental states (e.g., mood, stress, etc.), offering comprehensive and continuous monitoring of individuals over time. Previous attempts to model an individual's mental state were limited to subjective approaches or the inclusion of only a few modalities (i.e., phone, watch). Thus, the goal of our study was to investigate the capacity to more accurately predict affect through a fully automatic and objective approach using multiple commercial devices. Longitudinal physiological data and daily assessments of emotions were collected from a sample of college students using smart wearables and phones for over a year. Results showed that our model was able to predict next-day affect with accuracy comparable to state of the art methods.

Optimal Multi-Robot Motion Planning via Parabolic Relaxation

Multi-robot systems offer enhanced capability over their monolithic counterparts, but they come at a cost of increased complexity in coordination. To reduce complexity and to make the problem tractable, multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) methods in the literature adopt de-coupled approaches that sacrifice either optimality or dynamic feasibility. In this paper, we present a convexification method, namely "parabolic relaxation", to generate optimal and dynamically feasible trajectories for MRMP in the coupled joint-space of all robots. We leverage upon the proposed relaxation to tackle the problem complexity and to attain computational tractability for planning over one hundred robots in extremely clustered environments. We take a multi-stage optimization approach that consists of i) mathematically formulating MRMP as a non-convex optimization, ii) lifting the problem into a higher dimensional space, iii) convexifying the problem through the proposed computationally efficient parabolic relaxation, and iv) penalizing with iterative search to ensure feasibility and recovery of feasible and near-optimal solutions to the original problem. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of generating optimal and dynamically feasible trajectories for challenging motion planning problems with higher success rate than the state-of-the-art, yet remain computationally tractable for over one hundred robots in a highly dense environment.

Multi-Agent Motion Planning using Deep Learning for Space Applications

State-of-the-art motion planners cannot scale to a large number of systems. Motion planning for multiple agents is an NP (non-deterministic polynomial-time) hard problem, so the computation time increases exponentially with each addition of agents. This computational demand is a major stumbling block to the motion planner's application to future NASA missions involving the swarm of space vehicles. We applied a deep neural network to transform computationally demanding mathematical motion planning problems into deep learning-based numerical problems. We showed optimal motion trajectories can be accurately replicated using deep learning-based numerical models in several 2D and 3D systems with multiple agents. The deep learning-based numerical model demonstrates superior computational efficiency with plans generated 1000 times faster than the mathematical model counterpart.