EMPA: Evaluating Persona-Aligned Empathy as a Process

TL;DR

EMPA is a new framework for evaluating long-term, persona-aligned empathy in dialogue agents by analyzing sustained interactions and psychological alignment, addressing challenges of sparse feedback and latent user states.

Contribution

Introduces EMPA, a process-oriented evaluation framework that assesses empathy as a continuous support process using controllable scenarios and psychological trajectory scoring.

Findings

Supports reproducible comparison of empathic behavior

Extends to other agent settings with latent dynamics

Identifies strategic adaptation and failure modes

Abstract

Evaluating persona-aligned empathy in LLM-based dialogue agents remains challenging. User states are latent, feedback is sparse and difficult to verify in situ, and seemingly supportive turns can still accumulate into trajectories that drift from persona-specific needs. We introduce EMPA, a process-oriented framework that evaluates persona-aligned support as sustained intervention rather than isolated replies. EMPA distills real interactions into controllable, psychologically grounded scenarios, couples them with an open-ended multi-agent sandbox that exposes strategic adaptation and failure modes, and scores trajectories in a latent psychological space by directional alignment, cumulative impact, and stability. The resulting signals and metrics support reproducible comparison and optimization of long-horizon empathic behavior, and they extend to other agent settings shaped by latent dynamics and weak, hard-to-verify feedback.