# PsyDT: Using LLMs to Construct the Digital Twin of Psychological Counselor with Personalized Counseling Style for Psychological Counseling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04652/) (2024)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00273/) (2023)
- [CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16433/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [MULTI-Bench: A Multi-Turn Interactive Benchmark for Assessing Emotional Intelligence ability of Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00850/) (2025)
- [How Real Are Synthetic Therapy Conversations? Evaluating Fidelity in Prolonged Exposure Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21800/) (2025)
- [TheraMind: A Strategic and Adaptive Agent for Longitudinal Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25758/) (2025)
- [MCTSr-Zero: Self-Reflective Psychological Counseling Dialogues Generation via Principles and Adaptive Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23229/) (2025)
- [PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01802/) (2026)
- [Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20241/) (2025)
- [PsychAgent: An Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning Agent for Self-Evolving Psychological Counselor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00931/) (2026)
- [Toward Real-World Chinese Psychological Support Dialogues: CPsDD Dataset and a Co-Evolving Multi-Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07509/) (2025)
- [PEER: Unified Process-Outcome Reinforcement Learning for Structured Empathetic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09521/) (2025)
- [PsychePass: Calibrating LLM Therapeutic Competence via Trajectory-Anchored Tournaments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20330/) (2026)
- [Responsible Evaluation of AI for Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00065/) (2026)
- [TrustMH-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating the Trustworthiness of Large Language Models in Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03047/) (2026)
- [Reviewing Clinical Knowledge in Medical Large Language Models: Training and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20988/) (2025)
- [RHealthTwin: Towards Responsible and Multimodal Digital Twins for Personalized Well-being](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08486/) (2025)
- [EmoStage: A Framework for Accurate Empathetic Response Generation via Perspective-Taking and Phase Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19279/) (2025)
- [Enhancing User Engagement in Socially-Driven Dialogue through Interactive LLM Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21497/) (2025)
- [MoPHES:Leveraging on-device LLMs as Agent for Mobile Psychological Health Evaluation and Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16085/) (2025)
- [Toward expert-level motivational interviewing for health behavior improvement with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15446/) (2025)
- [EFT-CoT: A Multi-Agent Chain-of-Thought Framework for Emotion-Focused Therapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17842/) (2026)
- [CCD-CBT: Multi-Agent Therapeutic Interaction for CBT Guided by Cognitive Conceptualization Diagram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06551/) (2026)
- [Auditing Stealth Sycophancy in Mental-Health Dialogue: Structured Clinical-State Diagnostics and Clean Matched Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03472/) (2026)
- [When Seekers Are Hard to Help: Evaluating Emotional Support Dialogue Systems in Worst-Case Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28228/) (2026)
- [DMT-CBT: Longitudinal Therapeutic State Modeling for CBT Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03132/) (2026)
- [PsyCounAssist: A Full-Cycle AI-Powered Psychological Counseling Assistant System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16573/) (2025)
- [PsyLite Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21536/) (2025)
- [First, Do No Harm: AI Supervisor Scaffolds Novice Growth in Counselor Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09042/) (2025)
- [Towards Privacy-Preserving Mental Health Support with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01993/) (2026)
- [Psych=eChat: An Empathic Framework Focused on Emotion Shift Tracking and Safety Risk Analysis in Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12392/) (2026)
- [Cognitive Policy-Driven LLM for Diagnosis and Intervention of Cognitive Distortions in Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17178/) (2026)
- [SAGE: A Strategy-Aware Graph-Enhanced Generation Framework For Online Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26630/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Currently, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in the field of psychological counseling. However, existing mental health LLMs overlook a critical issue where they do not consider the fact that different psychological counselors exhibit different personal styles, including linguistic style and therapy techniques, etc. As a result, these LLMs fail to satisfy the individual needs of clients who seek different counseling styles. To help bridge this gap, we propose PsyDT, a novel framework using LLMs to construct the Digital Twin of Psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Compared to the time-consuming and costly approach of collecting a large number of real-world counseling cases to create a specific counselor's digital twin, our framework offers a faster and more cost-effective solution. To construct PsyDT, we utilize dynamic one-shot learning by using GPT-4 to capture counselor's unique counseling style, mainly focusing on linguistic style and therapy techniques. Subsequently, using existing single-turn long-text dialogues with client's questions, GPT-4 is guided to synthesize multi-turn dialogues of specific counselor. Finally, we fine-tune the LLMs on the synthetic dataset, PsyDTCorpus, to achieve the digital twin of psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Experimental results indicate that our proposed PsyDT framework can synthesize multi-turn dialogues that closely resemble real-world counseling cases and demonstrate better performance compared to other baselines, thereby show that our framework can effectively construct the digital twin of psychological counselor with a specific counseling style.