@inproceedings{galat-rizoiu-2026-uts,
    title = "{UTS} at {P}sy{D}ef{D}etect: Multi-Agent Councils and Absence-Based Reasoning for Defense Mechanism Classification",
    author = "Galat, Dima  and
      Rizoiu, Marian",
    editor = "Gupta, Deepak  and
      Demner-Fushman, Dina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the {B}io{NLP} 2026 (Shared Tasks)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.bionlp-2.6/",
    pages = "38--46",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-435-4",
    abstract = "This paper describes our system for classifying psychological defense mechanisms in emotional support dialogues using the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS), placing second (F1 0.406) among 64 teams.1 A central insight is that defense mechanisms are defined by what is absent: missing affect, blocked cognition, denied reality. We encode this as an affect-cognition integration spectrum in prompt-level clinical rules, which account for the largest single gain (+11.4pp F1).Our architecture is a multi-phase deliberative council of Gemini 2.5 agents where class-specific advocates rate evidence strength rather than voting, achieving F1 0.382 with no fine-tuning - a top-5 result on its own. We find, however, that the council is confidently wrong about minority classes: 59{--}80{\%} of stable minority predictions are incorrect, driven by a systematic ``L7 attractor'' in which emotional content defaults to the majority class. A targeted override ensemble from three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models applies 16 overrides (+2.4pp), selected by a structured multi-agent system (builder, critic, regression guard) that produced a larger F1 gain in one iteration than 8 prior attempts combined."
}