# StoryMI: Steerable Multi-Agent Therapeutic Dialogue Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27393 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27393/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical and scientific domain agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 24 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Medical and scientific domain agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/medical-and-scientific-domain-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

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- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08441/) (2020)
- [SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10465/) (2022)
- [What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08654/) (2019)
- [MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01454/) (2020)
- [CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16433/) (2024)
- [Long-Context Language Modeling with Parallel Context Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16617/) (2024)
- [A Computational Framework for Behavioral Assessment of LLM Therapists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00820/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Coherence in Dialogue Systems using Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03371/) (2019)
- [NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Doctor-Patient Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15959/) (2023)
- [Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15787/) (2024)
- [Modeling Motivational Interviewing Strategies On An Online Peer-to-Peer Counseling Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05182/) (2022)
- [PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02364/) (2023)
- [Virtual Agents for Alcohol Use Counseling: Exploring LLM-Powered Motivational Interviewing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08095/) (2024)
- [MDD-5k: A New Diagnostic Conversation Dataset for Mental Disorders Synthesized via Neuro-Symbolic LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12142/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Dialogue Strategy Learning for Motivational Interviewing via Inductive Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15737/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06527/) (2024)
- [Trustworthy AI Psychotherapy: Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Counseling and Explainable Mental Disorder Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11398/) (2025)
- [Script-Strategy Aligned Generation: Aligning LLMs with Expert-Crafted Dialogue Scripts and Therapeutic Strategies for Psychotherapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06723/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Interpretable Mental Health Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07653/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent dialogue, but prior works lack situational grounding, dynamic strategy control, and evaluation aligned with clinical standards in motivational interviewing (MI). We introduce StoryMI, a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation, where questionnaire-based client profiles are expanded into situational stories that provide narrative context for the dialogue. Therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes selected by the interaction agent, while an interaction agent dynamically coordinates exchanges to control MI strategies during a multi-turn conversation. We propose a two-level evaluation protocol: lexical metrics and MI-specific measures of macro-level counseling strategies, alongside LLM-as-judge and human expert assessments. We construct a dataset of 6K simulated MI dialogues grounded in 1K questionnaire-story pairs, covering 12 MI codes and 13 symptom domains, and benchmark six open- and closed-source LLMs. Our results show that situational grounding and macro-level control can improve MI adherence and clinical plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of a structured multi-agent workflow for psychotherapy dialogue generation. We provide code and data for reproducibility.