Psy-Copilot: Visual Chain of Thought for Counseling
This addresses the need for interpretability in AI-assisted therapy for mental health professionals, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM and visualization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of making large language models' reasoning transparent in psychological counseling by introducing Psy-COT, a graph that visualizes thought processes, and Psy-Copilot, an AI assistant that provides traceable psycho-information to assist human therapists, with both code and demo open-sourced.
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in the field of psychological counseling. However, when human therapists work with LLMs in therapy sessions, it is hard to understand how the model gives the answers. To address this, we have constructed Psy-COT, a graph designed to visualize the thought processes of LLMs during therapy sessions. The Psy-COT graph presents semi-structured counseling conversations alongside step-by-step annotations that capture the reasoning and insights of therapists. Moreover, we have developed Psy-Copilot, which is a conversational AI assistant designed to assist human psychological therapists in their consultations. It can offer traceable psycho-information based on retrieval, including response candidates, similar dialogue sessions, related strategies, and visual traces of results. We have also built an interactive platform for AI-assisted counseling. It has an interface that displays the relevant parts of the retrieval sub-graph. The Psy-Copilot is designed not to replace psychotherapists but to foster collaboration between AI and human therapists, thereby promoting mental health development. Our code and demo are both open-sourced and available for use.