Can You Share Your Story? Modeling Clients' Metacognition and Openness for LLM Therapist Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces MindVoyager, a new evaluation framework for LLM therapists that uses a controllable client simulator to better assess their ability to understand unexpressed client thoughts and beliefs.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, dynamic client simulator and new evaluation metrics to more accurately assess LLM therapists' understanding of clients' internal states.

Findings

MindVoyager provides a more realistic assessment environment.

The evaluation metrics effectively measure exploration and understanding.

Results show improved detection of unexpressed client beliefs.

Abstract

Understanding clients' thoughts and beliefs is fundamental in counseling, yet current evaluations of LLM therapists often fail to assess this ability. Existing evaluation methods rely on client simulators that clearly disclose internal states to the therapist, making it difficult to determine whether an LLM therapist can uncover unexpressed perspectives. To address this limitation, we introduce MindVoyager, a novel evaluation framework featuring a controllable and realistic client simulator which dynamically adapts itself based on the ongoing counseling session, offering a more realistic and challenging evaluation environment. We further introduce evaluation metrics that assess the exploration ability of LLM therapists by measuring their thorough understanding of client's beliefs and thoughts.