mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

StageWell: A Process-Aligned Chinese Corpus for Positive-Psychology Support Dialogue

arXiv 2608.29326 ↗First posted 29 Aug 2026cs.CL cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Medical LLM alignment

Abstract (arXiv)

Positive psychology dialogue aims to support emotional distress and positive resource building, requiring models to produce not only empathetic replies but also coherent progression through a multi-turn support process. Existing resources often reduce supervision to turn-level strategies or holistic preference labels, leaving process position, support function, and local repair targets implicit. We introduce StageWell, a process-aligned Chinese corpus for positive psychology dialogue, together with HQS, a structured protocol for data construction and evaluation. StageWell organizes support into a six-stage support process and uses a multi-agent whole-dialogue rewriting workflow to construct 12,445 SFT instances, 1,849 DPO preference pairs, and a GroundTruth subset of 120 expert-revised dialogues and 977 QA pairs. Guided by HQS, DPO pairs are built as process-localized repairs: flawed model outputs are used as rejected responses, and targeted rewrites under the same context and stage constraint are used as chosen responses. Across four 9B-14B open-source LLMs, this supervision yields robust gains in process control, response quality, and safety. Averaged across models, BERTScore improves by 0.037, Q-Overall increases by 1.32 points, S-exact increases by 0.236, and the H-critical rate decreases by 0.167. These results highlight the value of modeling supportive dialogue as a structured multi-turn support process rather than as single-turn response generation.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical LLM alignment, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.

Builds on

22 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimization22 May

Other references · 21

  1. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  2. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  3. 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,686
  4. 2024ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Toolscited by 1,096
  5. 2023BeaverTails: Towards Improved Safety Alignment of LLM via a Human-Preference Datasetcited by 828
  6. 2024SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuningcited by 345
  7. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  8. 2024LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Taskscited by 236
  9. 2017Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memorycited by 167
  10. 2023HelpSteer: Multi-attribute Helpfulness Dataset for SteerLMcited by 140
  11. 2023SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversationscited by 109
  12. 2021PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Supportcited by 92
9 more
  1. 2024CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counselingcited by 88
  2. 2024CheckEval: A reliable LLM-as-a-Judge framework for evaluating text generation using checklistscited by 87
  3. 2022MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 84
  4. 2022AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 79
  5. 2023Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interactioncited by 77
  6. 2024HealMe: Harnessing Cognitive Reframing in Large Language Models for Psychotherapycited by 47
  7. 2022Inducing Positive Perspectives with Text Reframingcited by 31
  8. 2023Training Models to Generate, Recognize, and Reframe Unhelpful Thoughtscited by 31
  9. 2024Structured Dialogue System for Mental Health: An LLM Chatbot Leveraging the PM+ Guidelinescited by 6

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Toward Real-World Chinese Psychological Support Dialogues: CPsDD Dataset and a Co-Evolving Multi-Agent System
  2. 2026TEA-Bench: A Systematic Benchmarking of Tool-enhanced Emotional Support Dialogue Agent
  3. 2025Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning
  4. 2025Empathy-R1: A Chain-of-Empathy and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Long-Form Mental Health Support
  5. 2026CALM-IT: Generating Realistic Long-Form Motivational Interviewing Dialogues with Dual-Actor Conversational Dynamics Tracking
  6. 2025ESC-Judge: A Framework for Comparing Emotional Support Conversational Agents
  7. 2025IntentionESC: An Intention-Centered Framework for Enhancing Emotional Support in Dialogue Systems
  8. 2023Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach