Aligning Large Language Models for Enhancing Psychiatric Interviews through Symptom Delineation and Summarization

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated their usage in various domains. Given the fact that psychiatric interviews are goal-oriented and structured dialogues between the professional interviewer and the interviewee, it is one of the most underexplored areas where LLMs can contribute substantial value. Here, we explore the use of LLMs for enhancing psychiatric interviews, by analyzing counseling data from North Korean defectors with traumatic events and mental health issues. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can (1) delineate the part of the conversation that suggests psychiatric symptoms and name the symptoms, and (2) summarize stressors and symptoms, based on the interview dialogue transcript. Here, the transcript data was labeled by mental health experts for training and evaluation of LLMs. Our experimental results show that appropriately prompted LLMs can achieve high performance on both the symptom delineation task and the summarization task. This research contributes to the nascent field of applying LLMs to psychiatric interview and demonstrates their potential effectiveness in aiding mental health practitioners.

Analysis of Using Sigmoid Loss for Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning has emerged as a prominent branch of self-supervised learning for several years. Especially, CLIP, which applies contrastive learning to large sets of captioned images, has garnered significant attention. Recently, SigLIP, a variant of CLIP, has been proposed, which uses the sigmoid loss instead of the standard InfoNCE loss. SigLIP achieves the performance comparable to CLIP in a more efficient manner by eliminating the need for a global view. However, theoretical understanding of using the sigmoid loss in contrastive learning is underexplored. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of using the sigmoid loss in contrastive learning, in the perspective of the geometric structure of learned embeddings. First, we propose the double-Constant Embedding Model (CCEM), a framework for parameterizing various well-known embedding structures by a single variable. Interestingly, the proposed CCEM is proven to contain the optimal embedding with respect to the sigmoid loss. Second, we mathematically analyze the optimal embedding minimizing the sigmoid loss for contrastive learning. The optimal embedding ranges from simplex equiangular-tight-frame to antipodal structure, depending on the temperature parameter used in the sigmoid loss. Third, our experimental results on synthetic datasets coincide with the theoretical results on the optimal embedding structures.