Andrea Raballo

Federico Ravenda, Seyed Ali Bahrainian, Andrea Raballo et al.

In psychological practices, standardized questionnaires serve as essential tools for assessing mental health through structured, clinically-validated questions (i.e., items). While social media platforms offer rich data for mental health screening, computational approaches often bypass these established clinical assessment tools in favor of black-box classification. We propose a novel questionnaire-guided screening framework that bridges psychological practice and computational methods through adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (\textit{aRAG}). Our approach links unstructured social media content and standardized clinical assessments by retrieving relevant posts for each questionnaire item and using Large Language Models (LLMs) to complete validated psychological instruments. Our findings demonstrate two key advantages of questionnaire-guided screening: First, when completing the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), our approach matches or outperforms state-of-the-art performance on Reddit-based benchmarks without requiring training data. Second, we show that guiding LLMs through standardized questionnaires can yield superior results compared to directly prompting them for depression screening, while also providing a more interpretable assessment by linking model outputs to clinically validated diagnostic criteria. Additionally, we show, as a proof-of-concept, how our questionnaire-based methodology can be extended to other mental conditions' screening, highlighting the promising role of LLMs as psychological assessors.

Alessandro De Grandi, Federico Ravenda, Andrea Raballo et al.

The increasing demand for mental health services has highlighted the need for innovative solutions, particularly in the realm of psychological conversational AI, where the availability of sensitive data is scarce. In this work, we explored the development of a system tailored for mental health support with a novel approach to psychological assessment based on explainable emotional profiles in combination with empathetic conversational models, offering a promising tool for augmenting traditional care, particularly where immediate expertise is unavailable. Our work can be divided into two main parts, intrinsecaly connected to each other. First, we present RACLETTE, a conversational system that demonstrates superior emotional accuracy compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks in both understanding users' emotional states and generating empathetic responses during conversations, while progressively building an emotional profile of the user through their interactions. Second, we show how the emotional profiles of a user can be used as interpretable markers for mental health assessment. These profiles can be compared with characteristic emotional patterns associated with different mental disorders, providing a novel approach to preliminary screening and support.

Federico Ravenda, Seyed Ali Bahrainian, Andrea Raballo et al.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) is transforming AI, opening new opportunities in sensitive and high-impact areas such as Mental Health (MH). Yet, despite these advancements, recent evidence reveals that smaller-scale models still struggle to deliver optimal performance in domain-specific applications. In this study, we present a cost-efficient yet powerful approach to improve MH assessment capabilities of an LLM, without relying on any computationally intensive techniques. Our lightweight method consists of a linear transformation applied to a specific layer's activations, leveraging steering vectors to guide the model's output. Remarkably, this intervention enables the model to achieve improved results across two distinct tasks: (1) identifying whether a Reddit post is useful for detecting the presence or absence of depressive symptoms (relevance prediction task), and (2) completing a standardized psychological screening questionnaire for depression based on users' Reddit post history (questionnaire completion task). Results highlight the untapped potential of steering mechanisms as computationally efficient tools for LLMs' MH domain adaptation.