mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations

arXiv 2311.00273 ↗First posted 1 Nov 2023cs.CLcited by 109

On the map: LLM reasoning → Clinical and biomedical applications

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their excellent capability for memorizing knowledge and chain of thought (CoT). When these language models are applied in the field of psychological counseling, they often rush to provide universal advice. However, when users seek psychological support, they need to gain empathy, trust, understanding and comfort, rather than just reasonable advice. To this end, we constructed a multi-turn empathetic conversation dataset of more than 2 million samples, in which the input is the multi-turn conversation context, and the target is empathetic responses that cover expressions such as questioning, comfort, recognition, listening, trust, emotional support, etc. Experiments have shown that the empathy ability of LLMs can be significantly enhanced when finetuning by using multi-turn dialogue history and responses that are closer to the expression of a psychological consultant.

Key facts. Cited by 109 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 10 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2023.

Builds on

10 of 20 references.

References · 10

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  3. 2021GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infillingcited by 1,026
  4. 2022GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Modelcited by 837
  5. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  6. 2021PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Supportcited by 92
  7. 2022MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 84
  8. 2022Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planningcited by 59
  9. 2022Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 56
  10. 2022FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 18

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 19; 2025: 44; 2026: 44.

109 papers.

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  1. 2024Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialoguecited by 121
  2. 2024CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counselingcited by 88
  3. 2024Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversationcited by 55
  4. 2025Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 47
  5. 2024A Comprehensive Survey of Large Language Models and Multimodal Large Language Models in Medicinecited by 45
  6. 2024Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactionscited by 43
  7. 2024PsyDT: Using LLMs to Construct the Digital Twin of Psychological Counselor with Personalized Counseling Style for Psychological Counselingcited by 37
  8. 2024A Survey on Medical Large Language Models: Technology, Application, Trustworthiness, and Future Directionscited by 34
  9. 2025A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontierscited by 34
  10. 2024PsycoLLM: Enhancing LLM for Psychological Understanding and Evaluationcited by 26
  11. 2024Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspectivecited by 24
  12. 2025RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agentscited by 24
38 more
  1. 2025AnnaAgent: Dynamic Evolution Agent System with Multi-Session Memory for Realistic Seeker Simulationcited by 21
  2. 2025Multimodal Large Language Models for Medicine: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 16
  3. 2024ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Modelscited by 15
  4. 2026A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulationcited by 14
  5. 2024Assessing Empathy in Large Language Models with Real-World Physician-Patient Interactionscited by 13
  6. 2025RTBAgent: A LLM-based Agent System for Real-Time Biddingcited by 13
  7. 2025KokoroChat: A Japanese Psychological Counseling Dialogue Dataset Collected via Role-Playing by Trained Counselorscited by 13
  8. 2025Mapping Caregiver Needs to AI Chatbot Design: Strengths and Gaps in Mental Health Support for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregiverscited by 13
  9. 2025A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directionscited by 12
  10. 2023PsyChat: A Client-Centric Dialogue System for Mental Health Supportcited by 11
  11. 2025Crisp: Cognitive Restructuring of Negative Thoughts through Multi-turn Supportive Dialoguescited by 11
  12. 2025A Survey of Scaling in Large Language Model Reasoningcited by 10
  13. 2024Empathy Level Alignment via Reinforcement Learning for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 8
  14. 2025OpenS2S: Advancing Fully Open-Source End-to-End Empathetic Large Speech Language Modelcited by 8
  15. 2024A Review of Human Emotion Synthesis Based on Generative Technologycited by 7
  16. 2025SYNTHEMPATHY: A Scalable Empathy Corpus Generated Using LLMs Without Any Crowdsourcingcited by 7
  17. 2026PAIR-SAFE: A Paired-Agent Approach for Runtime Auditing and Refining AI-Mediated Mental Health Supportcited by 7
  18. 2024PersonaMark: Personalized LLM watermarking for model protection and user attributioncited by 6
  19. 2024Structured Dialogue System for Mental Health: An LLM Chatbot Leveraging the PM+ Guidelinescited by 6
  20. 2025HamRaz: A Culture-Based Persian Conversation Dataset for Person-Centered Therapy Using LLM Agentscited by 6
  21. 2025MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-agent Inner Dialoguecited by 6
  22. 2025MAGneT: Coordinated Multi-Agent Generation of Synthetic Multi-Turn Mental Health Counseling Sessionscited by 6
  23. 2025From Rational Answers to Emotional Resonance: The Role of Controllable Emotion Generation in Language Modelscited by 5
  24. 2025DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimizationcited by 5
  25. 2025PersonaFuse: A Personality Activation-Driven Framework for Enhancing Human-LLM Interactionscited by 5
  26. 2026PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Modelscited by 5
  27. 2025CliniChat: A Multi-Source Knowledge-Driven Framework for Clinical Interview Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluationcited by 4
  28. 2025Exploring Safety Alignment Evaluation of LLMs in Chinese Mental Health Dialogues via LLM-as-Judgecited by 4
  29. 2025DiaCBT: A Long-Periodic Dialogue Corpus Guided by Cognitive Conceptualization Diagram for CBT-based Psychological Counselingcited by 4
  30. 2026PatientHub: A Unified Framework for Patient Simulationcited by 4
  31. 2024Enhancing Psychotherapy Counseling: A Data Augmentation Pipeline Leveraging Large Language Models for Counseling Conversationscited by 3
  32. 2024WundtGPT: Shaping Large Language Models To Be An Empathetic, Proactive Psychologistcited by 3
  33. 2024EmPO: Emotion Grounding for Empathetic Response Generation through Preference Optimizationcited by 3
  34. 2025MADP: Multi-Agent Deductive Planning for Enhanced Cognitive-Behavioral Mental Health Question Answercited by 3
  35. 2025Psy-Insight: Explainable Multi-turn Bilingual Dataset for Mental Health Counselingcited by 3
  36. 2025RedditESS: A Mental Health Social Support Interaction Dataset -- Understanding Effective Social Support to Refine AI-Driven Support Toolscited by 3
  37. 2025CASPER: A Large Scale Spontaneous Speech Datasetcited by 3
  38. 2025Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Modelscited by 3

50 most cited of 109 All 109 (JSON)

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2025Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning
  2. 2024TOOL-ED: Enhancing Empathetic Response Generation with the Tool Calling Capability of LLM
  3. 2023Chain of Empathy: Enhancing Empathetic Response of Large Language Models Based on Psychotherapy Models
  4. 2025Reasoning Is Not All You Need: Examining LLMs for Multi-Turn Mental Health Conversations
  5. 2025Leveraging Chain of Thought towards Empathetic Spoken Dialogue without Corresponding Question-Answering Data
  6. 2025Beyond Empathy: Integrating Diagnostic and Therapeutic Reasoning with Large Language Models for Mental Health Counseling
  7. 2026Guiding Language Models to Be More Empathetic: Culturally Sensitive Mental Health Advice Generation Through Human-LLM Collaboration
  8. 2025Large Language Model-Powered Conversational Agent Delivering Problem-Solving Therapy (PST) for Family Caregivers: Enhancing Empathy and Therapeutic Alliance Using In-Context Learning