# COCOA: CBT-based Conversational Counseling Agent using Memory Specialized in Cognitive Distortions and Dynamic Prompt

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17546/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02466/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Dense Retrieval with Relevance-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03166/) (2023)
- [An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17017/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11095/) (2025)
- [AutoCBT: An Autonomous Multi-agent Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09426/) (2025)
- [A Generic Review of Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19422/) (2024)
- [EFT-CoT: A Multi-Agent Chain-of-Thought Framework for Emotion-Focused Therapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17842/) (2026)
- [The Art of Socratic Inquiry: A Framework for Proactive Template-Guided Therapeutic Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01598/) (2026)
- [Multi-Perspective Triad Interaction Graph Neural Network for Cognitive Distortion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06785/) (2026)
- [From Pattern Recognizers to Personalized Companions: A Survey of Large Language Models in Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25186/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The demand for conversational agents that provide mental health care is consistently increasing. In this work, we develop a psychological counseling agent, referred to as CoCoA, that applies Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques to identify and address cognitive distortions inherent in the client's statements. Specifically, we construct a memory system to efficiently manage information necessary for counseling while extracting high-level insights about the client from their utterances. Additionally, to ensure that the counseling agent generates appropriate responses, we introduce dynamic prompting to flexibly apply CBT techniques and facilitate the appropriate retrieval of information. We conducted dialogues between CoCoA and characters from Character.ai, creating a dataset for evaluation. Then, we asked GPT to evaluate the constructed counseling dataset, and our model demonstrated a statistically significant difference from other models.