Koen Hindriks

Xin Sun, Yue Su, Yifan Mo et al.

Building trustworthy AI systems for mental health support is a shared priority across stakeholders from multiple disciplines. However, "trustworthy" remains loosely defined and inconsistently operationalized. AI research often focuses on technical criteria (e.g., robustness, explainability, and safety), while therapeutic practitioners emphasize therapeutic fidelity (e.g., appropriateness, empathy, and long-term user outcomes). To bridge the fragmented landscape, we propose a three-layer trust framework, covering human-oriented, AI-oriented, and interaction-oriented trust, integrating the viewpoints of key stakeholders (e.g., practitioners, researchers, regulators). Using this framework, we systematically review existing AI-driven research in mental health domain and examine evaluation practices for ``trustworthy'' ranging from automatic metrics to clinically validated approaches. We highlight critical gaps between what NLP currently measures and what real-world mental health contexts require, and outline a research agenda for building socio-technically aligned and genuinely trustworthy AI for mental health support.

Mithat Can Ozgun, Jiahuan Pei, Koen Hindriks et al.

LLM-based agents have emerged as transformative tools capable of executing complex tasks through iterative planning and action, achieving significant advancements in understanding and addressing user needs. Yet, their effectiveness remains limited in specialized domains such as mental health diagnosis, where they underperform compared to general applications. Current approaches to integrating diagnostic capabilities into LLMs rely on scarce, highly sensitive mental health datasets, which are challenging to acquire. These methods also fail to emulate clinicians' proactive inquiry skills, lack multi-turn conversational comprehension, and struggle to align outputs with expert clinical reasoning. To address these gaps, we propose DSM5AgentFlow, the first LLM-based agent workflow designed to autonomously generate DSM-5 Level-1 diagnostic questionnaires. By simulating therapist-client dialogues with specific client profiles, the framework delivers transparent, step-by-step disorder predictions, producing explainable and trustworthy results. This workflow serves as a complementary tool for mental health diagnosis, ensuring adherence to ethical and legal standards. Through comprehensive experiments, we evaluate leading LLMs across three critical dimensions: conversational realism, diagnostic accuracy, and explainability. Our datasets and implementations are fully open-sourced.

Jiahuan Pei, Fanghua Ye, Xin Sun et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced virtual educators and learners, bridging NLP with AI4Education. Existing work often lacks scalability and fails to leverage diverse, large-scale course content, with limited frameworks for assessing pedagogic quality. To this end, we propose WikiHowAgent, a multi-agent workflow leveraging LLMs to simulate interactive teaching-learning conversations. It integrates teacher and learner agents, an interaction manager, and an evaluator to facilitate procedural learning and assess pedagogic quality. We introduce a dataset of 114,296 teacher-learner conversations grounded in 14,287 tutorials across 17 domains and 727 topics. Our evaluation protocol combines computational and rubric-based metrics with human judgment alignment. Results demonstrate the workflow's effectiveness in diverse setups, offering insights into LLM capabilities across domains. Our datasets and implementations are fully open-sourced.

Qingyu Meng, Min Chen, Dingming Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent dialogue, but prior works lack situational grounding, dynamic strategy control, and evaluation aligned with clinical standards in motivational interviewing (MI). We introduce StoryMI, a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation, where questionnaire-based client profiles are expanded into situational stories that provide narrative context for the dialogue. Therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes selected by the interaction agent, while an interaction agent dynamically coordinates exchanges to control MI strategies during a multi-turn conversation. We propose a two-level evaluation protocol: lexical metrics and MI-specific measures of macro-level counseling strategies, alongside LLM-as-judge and human expert assessments. We construct a dataset of 6K simulated MI dialogues grounded in 1K questionnaire-story pairs, covering 12 MI codes and 13 symptom domains, and benchmark six open- and closed-source LLMs. Our results show that situational grounding and macro-level control can improve MI adherence and clinical plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of a structured multi-agent workflow for psychotherapy dialogue generation. We provide code and data for reproducibility.

Linlin Cheng, Koen Hindriks, Artem V. Belopolsky

In human-robot interaction (HRI), detecting a human's gaze helps robots interpret user attention and intent. However, most gaze detection approaches rely on specialized eye-tracking hardware, limiting deployment in everyday settings. Appearance-based gaze estimation methods remove this dependency by using standard RGB cameras, but their practicality in HRI remains underexplored. We present a calibration-free framework for detecting task progression when information is conveyed via integrated display interfaces. The framework uses only the robot's built-in monocular RGB camera (640x480 resolution) and state-of-the-art gaze estimation to monitor attention patterns. It leverages natural behavior, where users shift focus from task interfaces to the robot's face to signal task completion, formalized through three Areas of Interest (AOI): tablet, robot face, and elsewhere. Systematic parameter optimization identifies configurations that balance detection accuracy and interaction latency. We validate our framework in a "First Day at Work" scenario, comparing it to button-based interaction. Results show a task completion detection accuracy of 77.6%. Compared to button-based interaction, the proposed system exhibits slightly higher response latency but preserves information retention and significantly improves comfort, social presence, and perceived naturalness. Notably, most participants reported that they did not consciously use eye movements to guide the interaction, underscoring the intuitive role of gaze as a communicative cue. This work demonstrates the feasibility of intuitive, low-cost, RGB-only gaze-based HRI for natural and engaging interactions.

Saloni Singh, Koen Hindriks, Dirk Heylen et al.

The co creativity community is making significant progress in developing more sophisticated and tailored systems to support and enhance human creativity. Design considerations from prior work can serve as a valuable and efficient foundation for future systems. To support this effort, we conducted a systematic literature review of 62 papers on co-creative systems. These papers cover a diverse range of applications, including visual arts, design, and writing, where the AI acts not just as a tool but as an active collaborator in the creative process. From this review, we identified several key dimensions relevant to system design: phase of the creative process, creative task, proactive behavior of the system, user control, system embodiment, and AI model type. Our findings suggest that systems offering high user control lead to greater satisfaction, trust, and a stronger sense of ownership over creative outcomes. Furthermore, proactive systems, when adaptive and context sensitive, can enhance collaboration. We also extracted 24 design considerations, highlighting the value of encouraging users to externalize their thoughts and of increasing the system's social presence and transparency to foster trust. Despite recent advancements, important gaps remain, such as limited support for early creative phases like problem clarification, and challenges related to user adaptation to AI systems.

Albert Tang, Yifan Mo, Jie Li et al.

The double empathy problem frames communication difficulties between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals as arising from mutual misunderstanding, yet most interventions focus on autistic individuals. We present NeuroWise, a multi-agent LLM-based coaching system that supports neurotypical users through stress visualization, interpretation of internal experiences, and contextual guidance. In a between-subjects study (N=30), NeuroWise was rated as helpful by all participants and showed a significant condition-time effect on deficit-based attributions (p=0.02): NeuroWise users reduced deficit framing, while baseline users shifted toward blaming autistic "deficits" after difficult interactions. NeuroWise users also completed conversations more efficiently (37% fewer turns, p=0.03). These findings suggest that AI-based interpretation can support attributional change by helping users recognize communication challenges as mutual.

Liza Darwesh, Jaspreet Singh, Marin Marian et al.

This study investigates the elicitation of empathy toward a third party through interaction with social agents. Participants engaged with either a physical robot or a voice-enabled chatbot, both driven by a large language model (LLM) programmed to exhibit either an empathetic tone or remain neutral. The interaction is focused on a fictional character, Katie Banks, who is in a challenging situation and in need of financial donations. The willingness to help Katie, measured by the number of hours participants were willing to volunteer, along with their perceptions of the agent, were assessed for 60 participants. Results indicate that neither robotic embodiment nor empathetic tone significantly influenced participants' willingness to volunteer. While the LLM effectively simulated human empathy, fostering genuine empathetic responses in participants proved challenging.

Muhan Hou, Koen Hindriks, A. E. Eiben et al.

Transfer Learning (TL) is a powerful tool that enables robots to transfer learned policies across different environments, tasks, or embodiments. To further facilitate this process, efforts have been made to combine it with Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) for more flexible and efficient policy transfer. However, these approaches are almost exclusively limited to offline demonstrations collected before policy transfer starts, which may suffer from the intrinsic issue of covariance shift brought by LfD and harm the performance of policy transfer. Meanwhile, extensive work in the learning-from-scratch setting has shown that online demonstrations can effectively alleviate covariance shift and lead to better policy performance with improved sample efficiency. This work combines these insights to introduce online demonstrations into a policy transfer setting. We present Policy Transfer with Online Demonstrations, an active LfD algorithm for policy transfer that can optimize the timing and content of queries for online episodic expert demonstrations under a limited demonstration budget. We evaluate our method in eight robotic scenarios, involving policy transfer across diverse environment characteristics, task objectives, and robotic embodiments, with the aim to transfer a trained policy from a source task to a related but different target task. The results show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines in terms of average success rate and sample efficiency, compared to two canonical LfD methods with offline demonstrations and one active LfD method with online demonstrations. Additionally, we conduct preliminary sim-to-real tests of the transferred policy on three transfer scenarios in the real-world environment, demonstrating the policy effectiveness on a real robot manipulator.

Muhan Hou, Koen Hindriks, A. E. Eiben et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved great success in sequential decision-making problems, but often at the cost of a large number of agent-environment interactions. To improve sample efficiency, methods like Reinforcement Learning from Expert Demonstrations (RLED) introduce external expert demonstrations to facilitate agent exploration during the learning process. In practice, these demonstrations, which are often collected from human users, are costly and hence often constrained to a limited amount. How to select the best set of human demonstrations that is most beneficial for learning therefore becomes a major concern. This paper presents EARLY (Episodic Active Learning from demonstration querY), an algorithm that enables a learning agent to generate optimized queries of expert demonstrations in a trajectory-based feature space. Based on a trajectory-level estimate of uncertainty in the agent's current policy, EARLY determines the optimized timing and content for feature-based queries. By querying episodic demonstrations as opposed to isolated state-action pairs, EARLY improves the human teaching experience and achieves better learning performance. We validate the effectiveness of our method in three simulated navigation tasks of increasing difficulty. The results show that our method is able to achieve expert-level performance for all three tasks with convergence over 30\% faster than other baseline methods when demonstrations are generated by simulated oracle policies. The results of a follow-up pilot user study (N=18) further validate that our method can still maintain a significantly better convergence in the case of human expert demonstrators while achieving a better user experience in perceived task load and consuming significantly less human time.