Using large language models (LLMs) to assist psychological counseling is a significant but challenging task at present. Attempts have been made on improving empathetic conversations or acting as effective assistants in the treatment with LLMs. However, the existing datasets lack consulting knowledge, resulting in LLMs lacking professional consulting competence. Moreover, how to automatically evaluate multi-turn dialogues within the counseling process remains an understudied area. To bridge the gap, we propose CPsyCoun, a report-based multi-turn dialogue reconstruction and evaluation framework for Chinese psychological counseling. To fully exploit psychological counseling reports, a two-phase approach is devised to construct high-quality dialogues while a comprehensive evaluation benchmark is developed for the effective automatic evaluation of multi-turn psychological consultations. Competitive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in psychological counseling. We open-source the datasets and model for future research.

The development of large language models (LLMs) raises the importance of assessing the fairness and completeness of various evaluation benchmarks. Regrettably, these benchmarks predominantly utilize uniform manual prompts, which may not fully capture the expansive capabilities of LLMs—potentially leading to an underestimation of their performance. To unlock the potential of LLMs, researchers pay attention to automated prompt search methods, which employ LLMs as optimizers to discover optimal prompts. However, previous methods generate the solutions implicitly, which overlook the underlying thought process and lack explicit feedback. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt introspective search framework, namely PromISe, to better release the capabilities of LLMs. It converts the process of optimizing prompts into an explicit chain of thought, through a step-by-step procedure that integrates self-introspect and self-refine. Extensive experiments, conducted over 73 tasks on two major benchmarks, demonstrate that our proposed PromISe significantly boosts the performance of 12 well-known LLMs compared to the baseline approach. Moreover, our study offers enhanced insights into the interaction between humans and LLMs, potentially serving as a foundation for future designs and implementations. Keywords: large language models, prompt search, self-introspect, self-refine

Adversarial training is the dominant strategy towards model robustness. Current adversarial training methods typically apply perturbations to embedding representations, whereas actual text-based attacks introduce perturbations as discrete tokens. Thus there exists a gap between the continuous embedding representations and discrete text tokens that hampers the effectiveness of adversarial training. Moreover, the continuous representations of perturbations cannot be further utilized, resulting in the suboptimal performance. To bridge this gap for adversarial robustness, in this paper, we devise a novel generative adversarial training framework that integrates gradient-based learning, adversarial example generation and perturbed token detection. Our proposed framework consists of generative adversarial attack and adversarial training process. Specifically, in generative adversarial attack, the embeddings are shared between the classifier and the generative model, which enables the generative model to leverage the gradients from the classifier for generating perturbed tokens. Then, adversarial training process combines adversarial regularization with perturbed token detection to provide token-level supervision and improve the efficiency of sample utilization. Extensive experiments on five datasets from the AdvGLUE benchmark demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the model robustness, surpassing the state-of-the-art results of ChatGPT by 10% in average accuracy.

Emotion-cause pair extraction aims to extract all emotion clauses coupled with their cause clauses from a given document. Previous work employs two-step approaches, in which the first step extracts emotion clauses and cause clauses separately, and the second step trains a classifier to filter out negative pairs. However, such pipeline-style system for emotion-cause pair extraction is suboptimal because it suffers from error propagation and the two steps may not adapt to each other well. In this paper, we tackle emotion-cause pair extraction from a ranking perspective, i.e., ranking clause pair candidates in a document, and propose a one-step neural approach which emphasizes inter-clause modeling to perform end-to-end extraction. It models the interrelations between the clauses in a document to learn clause representations with graph attention, and enhances clause pair representations with kernel-based relative position embedding for effective ranking. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the current two-step systems, especially in the condition of extracting multiple pairs in one document.