# ChatWise: A Strategy-Guided Chatbot for Enhancing Cognitive Support in Older Adults

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05740/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Length-Controlled AlpacaEval: A Simple Way to Debias Automatic Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04475/) (2024)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [ArCHer: Training Language Model Agents via Hierarchical Multi-Turn RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19446/) (2024)
- [What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08654/) (2019)
- [LMRL Gym: Benchmarks for Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18232/) (2023)
- [AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13047/) (2022)
- [A Complete Survey on LLM-based AI Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16937/) (2024)
- [Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: Advancing Forwards or Looking Backwards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04245/) (2020)
- [A Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue System with Multi-source Knowledge Fusion for Elders with Cognitive Impairment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08200/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Nursing and Elderly Care with Large Language Models: An AI-Driven Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09946/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cognitive health in older adults presents a growing challenge. Although conversational interventions show feasibility in improving cognitive wellness, human caregiver resources remain overloaded. AI-based chatbots have shown promise, yet existing work is often limited to implicit strategies or heavily depends on training and label resources. In response, we propose a strategy-guided AI chatbot named ChatWise that follows a dual-level conversation reasoning framework. It integrates macro-level strategy planning and micro-level utterance generation to enable engaging, multi-turn dialogue tailored to older adults. Empirical results show that ChatWise closely aligns with professional human caregiver behaviors in offline evaluation using real clinic data, and achieves positive user cognitive and emotional responses in interactive simulations with digital twins, which significantly outperforms AI baselines that follow implicit conversation generation.