AutoCBT: An Autonomous Multi-agent Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychological Counseling

Traditional in-person psychological counseling remains primarily niche, often chosen by individuals with psychological issues, while online automated counseling offers a potential solution for those hesitant to seek help due to feelings of shame. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an essential and widely used approach in psychological counseling. The advent of large language models (LLMs) and agent technology enables automatic CBT diagnosis and treatment. However, current LLM-based CBT systems use agents with a fixed structure, limiting their self-optimization capabilities, or providing hollow, unhelpful suggestions due to redundant response patterns. In this work, we utilize Quora-like and YiXinLi single-round consultation models to build a general agent framework that generates high-quality responses for single-turn psychological consultation scenarios. We use a bilingual dataset to evaluate the quality of single-response consultations generated by each framework. Then, we incorporate dynamic routing and supervisory mechanisms inspired by real psychological counseling to construct a CBT-oriented autonomous multi-agent framework, demonstrating its general applicability. Experimental results indicate that AutoCBT can provide higher-quality automated psychological counseling services.

NUMCoT: Numerals and Units of Measurement in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning using Large Language Models

Numeral systems and units of measurement are two conjoined topics in activities of human beings and have mutual effects with the languages expressing them. Currently, the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) often involves mathematical reasoning, yet little attention is given to how minor changes in numbers or units can drastically alter the complexity of problems and the performance of LLMs. In this paper, we scrutinize existing LLMs on processing of numerals and units of measurement by constructing datasets with perturbations. We first anatomize the reasoning of math word problems to different sub-procedures like numeral conversions from language to numbers and measurement conversions based on units. Then we further annotate math word problems from ancient Chinese arithmetic works which are challenging in numerals and units of measurement. Experiments on perturbed datasets demonstrate that LLMs still encounter difficulties in handling numeral and measurement conversions.