Junhong Lai
2026
From Synthesis to Clinical Assistance: A Strategy-Aware Agent Framework for Autism Intervention based on Real Clinical Dataset
Junhong Lai | Shuzhong Lai | Yanhao Yu | Wanlin Chen | Chenyu Yan | Haifeng Li | Lin Yao | Yueming Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Junhong Lai | Shuzhong Lai | Yanhao Yu | Wanlin Chen | Chenyu Yan | Haifeng Li | Lin Yao | Yueming Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The development of AI-assisted Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is severely constrained by data scarcity. Furthermore, while Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) serves as the gold standard for clinical intervention, general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to strictly adhere to its standardized procedures, often resulting in interactions that are linguistically fluent but strategically inconsistent. To address these challenges, we introduce ASDAgent, a strategy-aware framework designed to unify high-fidelity intervention dialogue synthesis and clinical decision support. ASDAgent incorporates two specialized components to solve distinct problems: (i) a DoctorAgent equipped with an Observe-Think-Act-Correct (O-T-A-C) reasoning loop, which resolves the issue of strategy collapse in LLMs by making ABA execution explicit and controllable; and (ii) a ChildAgent that utilizes probabilistic behavior modeling to mitigate data homogeneity, simulating diverse and non-deterministic ASD response patterns. Experiments demonstrate that dialogues generated by ASDAgent closely mirror the strategy distribution of human therapists (KL divergence: 0.083). In real autism intervention, ASDAgent achieves nearly 80% strategic consistency with human experts. Moreover, we show that synthetic data produced by ASDAgent effectively distills professional clinical knowledge into small language models (SLMs), significantly enhancing their therapeutic capabilities.
2025
ASD-iLLM:An Intervention Large Language Model for Autistic Children based on Real Clinical Dialogue Intervention Dataset
Shuzhong Lai | Chenxi Li | Junhong Lai | Yucun Zhong | Chenyu Yan | Xiang Li | Haifeng Li | Gang Pan | Lin Yao | Yueming Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Shuzhong Lai | Chenxi Li | Junhong Lai | Yucun Zhong | Chenyu Yan | Xiang Li | Haifeng Li | Gang Pan | Lin Yao | Yueming Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Currently, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for autism intervention is a significant yet challenging task, particularly when directly employing LLMs as an intervention doctor. Researchers have mainly focused on using prompt engineering for role play as an intervention doctor and integrating auxiliary elements such as visual stimuli to enhance the sensory experience of the intervention, while neglecting the challenge that LLMs’ inherent dialogue style and intervention strategies do not meet the requirements of clinical dialogue interventions. To fill the gap, we propose a comprehensive framework for training LLMs to conduct dialogue interventions in accordance with the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) which is commonly used by clinicians. Specifically, we collected clinical recordings of dialogue interventions for autistic children and constructed the topic dialogue dataset ASD-iLLM-8k. By incorporating the system prompt based on the ABA and ASD-iLLM-8k dataset, we fine-tuned LLMs to develop ASD-iLLM. We also proposed a role-play strategy in which LLMs act as autistic children to comprehensively evaluate the doctor model’s capabilities at the dialogue level. Extensive experiments indicate that ASD-iLLM outperforms existing models in both automatic and human evaluation, with intervention strategies and dialogue style more closely resembling those of clinical intervention doctors. Our dataset, model, and code are available on https://github.com/Shuzhong-Lai/ASD-iLLM.