@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-annaagent,
    title = "{A}nna{A}gent: Dynamic Evolution Agent System with Multi-Session Memory for Realistic Seeker Simulation",
    author = "Wang, Ming  and
      Wang, Peidong  and
      Wu, Lin  and
      Yang, Xiaocui  and
      Wang, Daling  and
      Feng, Shi  and
      Chen, Yuxin  and
      Wang, Bixuan  and
      Zhang, Yifei",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1192/",
    pages = "23221--23235",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Constrained by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in AI-driven mental health, researchers develop LLM-based conversational agents (CAs) with tailored configurations, such as profiles, symptoms, and scenarios, to simulate seekers. While these efforts advance AI in mental health, achieving more realistic seeker simulation remains hindered by two key challenges: dynamic evolution and multi-session memory. Seekers' mental states often fluctuate during counseling, which typically spans multiple sessions. To address this, we propose **AnnaAgent**, an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory. AnnaAgent incorporates an emotion modulator and a complaint elicitor trained on real counseling dialogues, enabling dynamic control of the simulator{'}s configurations. Additionally, its tertiary memory mechanism effectively integrates short-term and long-term memory across sessions. Evaluation results, both automated and manual, demonstrate that AnnaAgent achieves more realistic seeker simulation in psychological counseling compared to existing baselines. The ethically reviewed and screened code can be found on [https://github.com/sci-m-wang/AnnaAgent](https://github.com/sci-m-wang/AnnaAgent)."
}