DeepPsy-Agent: A Stage-Aware and Deep-Thinking Emotional Support Agent System
This addresses critical challenges in intelligent mental health services by providing more effective emotional support, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing psychological theories and deep learning techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of AI-based psychological support by developing DeepPsy-Agent, a system that integrates stage-aware dialogue and deep-thinking analysis, resulting in outperformance over general-purpose LLMs with improvements such as a 58.3% increase in root-cause identification and a 72.1% reduction in ineffective suggestions.
This paper introduces DeepPsy-Agent, an innovative psychological support system that combines the three-stage helping theory in psychology with deep learning techniques. The system consists of two core components: (1) a multi-stage response-capable dialogue model (\textit{deeppsy-chat}), which enhances reasoning capabilities through stage-awareness and deep-thinking analysis to generate high-quality responses; and (2) a real-time stage transition detection model that identifies contextual shifts to guide the dialogue towards more effective intervention stages. Based on 30,000 real psychological hotline conversations, we employ AI-simulated dialogues and expert re-annotation strategies to construct a high-quality multi-turn dialogue dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepPsy-Agent outperforms general-purpose large language models (LLMs) in key metrics such as problem exposure completeness, cognitive restructuring success rate, and action adoption rate. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of stage-awareness and deep-thinking modules, showing that stage information contributes 42.3\% to performance, while the deep-thinking module increases root-cause identification by 58.3\% and reduces ineffective suggestions by 72.1\%. This system addresses critical challenges in AI-based psychological support through dynamic dialogue management and deep reasoning, advancing intelligent mental health services.