Conversational Topic Recommendation in Counseling and Psychotherapy with Decision Transformer and Large Language Models

Given the increasing demand for mental health assistance, artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), may be valuable for integration into automated clinical support systems. In this work, we leverage a decision transformer architecture for topic recommendation in counseling conversations between patients and mental health professionals. The architecture is utilized for offline reinforcement learning, and we extract states (dialogue turn embeddings), actions (conversation topics), and rewards (scores measuring the alignment between patient and therapist) from previous turns within a conversation to train a decision transformer model. We demonstrate an improvement over baseline reinforcement learning methods, and propose a novel system of utilizing our model's output as synthetic labels for fine-tuning a large language model for the same task. Although our implementation based on LLaMA-2 7B has mixed results, future work can undoubtedly build on the design.

The Machine Can't Replace the Human Heart

What is the true heart of mental healthcare -- innovation or humanity? Can virtual therapy ever replicate the profound human bonds where healing arises? As artificial intelligence and immersive technologies promise expanded access, safeguards must ensure technologies remain supplementary tools guided by providers' wisdom. Implementation requires nuance balancing efficiency and empathy. If conscious of ethical risks, perhaps AI could restore humanity by automating tasks, giving providers more time to listen. Yet no algorithm can replicate the seat of dignity within. We must ask ourselves: What future has people at its core? One where AI thoughtfully plays a collaborative role? Or where pursuit of progress leaves vulnerability behind? This commentary argues for a balanced approach thoughtfully integrating technology while retaining care's irreplaceable human essence, at the heart of this profoundly human profession. Ultimately, by nurturing innovation and humanity together, perhaps we reach new heights of empathy previously unimaginable.

COMPASS: Computational Mapping of Patient-Therapist Alliance Strategies with Language Modeling

The therapeutic working alliance is a critical factor in predicting the success of psychotherapy treatment. Traditionally, working alliance assessment relies on questionnaires completed by both therapists and patients. In this paper, we present COMPASS, a novel framework to directly infer the therapeutic working alliance from the natural language used in psychotherapy sessions. Our approach utilizes advanced large language models to analyze transcripts of psychotherapy sessions and compare them with distributed representations of statements in the working alliance inventory. Analyzing a dataset of over 950 sessions covering diverse psychiatric conditions, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in microscopically mapping patient-therapist alignment trajectories and providing interpretability for clinical psychiatry and in identifying emerging patterns related to the condition being treated. By employing various neural topic modeling techniques in combination with generative language prompting, we analyze the topical characteristics of different psychiatric conditions and incorporate temporal modeling to capture the evolution of topics at a turn-level resolution. This combined framework enhances the understanding of therapeutic interactions, enabling timely feedback for therapists regarding conversation quality and providing interpretable insights to improve the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

The Topology and Geometry of Neural Representations

A central question for neuroscience is how to characterize brain representations of perceptual and cognitive content. An ideal characterization should distinguish different functional regions with robustness to noise and idiosyncrasies of individual brains that do not correspond to computational differences. Previous studies have characterized brain representations by their representational geometry, which is defined by the representational dissimilarity matrix (RDM), a summary statistic that abstracts from the roles of individual neurons (or responses channels) and characterizes the discriminability of stimuli. Here we explore a further step of abstraction: from the geometry to the topology of brain representations. We propose topological representational similarity analysis (tRSA), an extension of representational similarity analysis (RSA) that uses a family of geo-topological summary statistics that generalizes the RDM to characterize the topology while de-emphasizing the geometry. We evaluate this new family of statistics in terms of the sensitivity and specificity for model selection using both simulations and functional MRI (fMRI) data. In the simulations, the ground truth is a data-generating layer representation in a neural network model and the models are the same and other layers in different model instances (trained from different random seeds). In fMRI, the ground truth is a visual area and the models are the same and other areas measured in different subjects. Results show that topology-sensitive characterizations of population codes are robust to noise and interindividual variability and maintain excellent sensitivity to the unique representational signatures of different neural network layers and brain regions.

Utterance Classification with Logical Neural Network: Explainable AI for Mental Disorder Diagnosis

In response to the global challenge of mental health problems, we proposes a Logical Neural Network (LNN) based Neuro-Symbolic AI method for the diagnosis of mental disorders. Due to the lack of effective therapy coverage for mental disorders, there is a need for an AI solution that can assist therapists with the diagnosis. However, current Neural Network models lack explainability and may not be trusted by therapists. The LNN is a Recurrent Neural Network architecture that combines the learning capabilities of neural networks with the reasoning capabilities of classical logic-based AI. The proposed system uses input predicates from clinical interviews to output a mental disorder class, and different predicate pruning techniques are used to achieve scalability and higher scores. In addition, we provide an insight extraction method to aid therapists with their diagnosis. The proposed system addresses the lack of explainability of current Neural Network models and provides a more trustworthy solution for mental disorder diagnosis.

Towards Healthy AI: Large Language Models Need Therapists Too

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of powerful AI chatbots capable of engaging in natural and human-like conversations. However, these chatbots can be potentially harmful, exhibiting manipulative, gaslighting, and narcissistic behaviors. We define Healthy AI to be safe, trustworthy and ethical. To create healthy AI systems, we present the SafeguardGPT framework that uses psychotherapy to correct for these harmful behaviors in AI chatbots. The framework involves four types of AI agents: a Chatbot, a "User," a "Therapist," and a "Critic." We demonstrate the effectiveness of SafeguardGPT through a working example of simulating a social conversation. Our results show that the framework can improve the quality of conversations between AI chatbots and humans. Although there are still several challenges and directions to be addressed in the future, SafeguardGPT provides a promising approach to improving the alignment between AI chatbots and human values. By incorporating psychotherapy and reinforcement learning techniques, the framework enables AI chatbots to learn and adapt to human preferences and values in a safe and ethical way, contributing to the development of a more human-centric and responsible AI.

Psychotherapy AI Companion with Reinforcement Learning Recommendations and Interpretable Policy Dynamics

We introduce a Reinforcement Learning Psychotherapy AI Companion that generates topic recommendations for therapists based on patient responses. The system uses Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to generate multi-objective policies for four different psychiatric conditions: anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and suicidal cases. We present our experimental results on the accuracy of recommended topics using three different scales of working alliance ratings: task, bond, and goal. We show that the system is able to capture the real data (historical topics discussed by the therapists) relatively well, and that the best performing models vary by disorder and rating scale. To gain interpretable insights into the learned policies, we visualize policy trajectories in a 2D principal component analysis space and transition matrices. These visualizations reveal distinct patterns in the policies trained with different reward signals and trained on different clinical diagnoses. Our system's success in generating DIsorder-Specific Multi-Objective Policies (DISMOP) and interpretable policy dynamics demonstrates the potential of DRL in providing personalized and efficient therapeutic recommendations.

TherapyView: Visualizing Therapy Sessions with Temporal Topic Modeling and AI-Generated Arts

We present the TherapyView, a demonstration system to help therapists visualize the dynamic contents of past treatment sessions, enabled by the state-of-the-art neural topic modeling techniques to analyze the topical tendencies of various psychiatric conditions and deep learning-based image generation engine to provide a visual summary. The system incorporates temporal modeling to provide a time-series representation of topic similarities at a turn-level resolution and AI-generated artworks given the dialogue segments to provide a concise representations of the contents covered in the session, offering interpretable insights for therapists to optimize their strategies and enhance the effectiveness of psychotherapy. This system provides a proof of concept of AI-augmented therapy tools with e in-depth understanding of the patient's mental state and enabling more effective treatment.

A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Online Speaker Diarization

Speaker diarization is a task to label an audio or video recording with the identity of the speaker at each given time stamp. In this work, we propose a novel machine learning framework to conduct real-time multi-speaker diarization and recognition without prior registration and pretraining in a fully online and reinforcement learning setting. Our framework combines embedding extraction, clustering, and resegmentation into the same problem as an online decision-making problem. We discuss practical considerations and advanced techniques such as the offline reinforcement learning, semi-supervision, and domain adaptation to address the challenges of limited training data and out-of-distribution environments. Our approach considers speaker diarization as a fully online learning problem of the speaker recognition task, where the agent receives no pretraining from any training set before deployment, and learns to detect speaker identity on the fly through reward feedbacks. The paradigm of the reinforcement learning approach to speaker diarization presents an adaptive, lightweight, and generalizable system that is useful for multi-user teleconferences, where many people might come and go without extensive pre-registration ahead of time. Lastly, we provide a desktop application that uses our proposed approach as a proof of concept. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to apply a reinforcement learning approach to the speaker diarization task.

A Survey on Compositional Generalization in Applications

The field of compositional generalization is currently experiencing a renaissance in AI, as novel problem settings and algorithms motivated by various practical applications are being introduced, building on top of the classical compositional generalization problem. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of top recent developments in multiple real-life applications of the compositional generalization. Specifically, we introduce a taxonomy of common applications and summarize the state-of-the-art for each of those domains. Furthermore, we identify important current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to the future of this burgeoning field.