Multi-View Attention Multiple-Instance Learning Enhanced by LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Detection

Jun Seo Kim, Hyemi Kim, Woo Joo OH, Hongjin Cho, Hochul Lee, Hye Hyeon Kim


Abstract
Cognitive distortions have been closely linked to mental health disorders, yet their automatic detection remains challenging due to contextual ambiguity, co-occurrence, and semantic overlap. We propose a novel framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) architecture to enhance interpretability and expression-level reasoning. Each utterance is decomposed into Emotion, Logic, and Behavior (ELB) components, which are processed by LLMs to infer multiple distortion instances, each with a predicted type, expression, and model-assigned salience score. These instances are integrated via a Multi-View Gated Attention mechanism for final classification. Experiments on Korean (KoACD) and English (Therapist QA) datasets demonstrate that incorporating ELB and LLM-inferred salience scores improves classification performance, especially for distortions with high interpretive ambiguity. Our results suggest a psychologically grounded and generalizable approach for fine-grained reasoning in mental health NLP. The dataset and implementation details are publicly accessible.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1691
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
36505–36525
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1691/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jun Seo Kim, Hyemi Kim, Woo Joo OH, Hongjin Cho, Hochul Lee, and Hye Hyeon Kim. 2026. Multi-View Attention Multiple-Instance Learning Enhanced by LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Detection. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 36505–36525, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-View Attention Multiple-Instance Learning Enhanced by LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Detection (Kim et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1691.pdf
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