From Stateless to Situated: Building a Psychological World for LLM-Based Emotional Support

TL;DR

This paper introduces LEKIA 2.0, a new LLM architecture that maintains a persistent external situational model to improve multi-turn emotional support, addressing the statelessness of traditional models and enhancing stability and control.

Contribution

LEKIA 2.0 decouples situational modeling from intervention, enabling stable, controllable multi-turn emotional support with an innovative evaluation protocol.

Findings

31% improvement over prompt-only baselines

Effective maintenance of user situation and consent boundaries

Enhanced stability and control in emotional support interactions

Abstract

In psychological support and emotional companionship scenarios, the core limitation of large language models (LLMs) lies not merely in response quality, but in their reliance on local next-token prediction, which prevents them from maintaining the temporal continuity, stage awareness, and user consent boundaries required for multi-turn intervention. This stateless characteristic makes systems prone to premature advancement, stage misalignment, and boundary violations in continuous dialogue. To address this problem, we argue that the key challenge in process-oriented emotional support is not simply generating natural language, but constructing a sustainably updatable external situational structure for the model. We therefore propose LEKIA 2.0, a situated LLM architecture that separates the cognitive layer from the executive layer, thereby decoupling situational modeling from intervention execution. This design enables the system to maintain stable representations of the user's situation and consent boundaries throughout ongoing interaction. To evaluate this process-control capability, we further introduce a Static-to-Dynamic online evaluation protocol for multi-turn interaction. LEKIA achieved an average absolute improvement of approximately 31% over prompt-only baselines in deep intervention loop completion. The results suggest that an external situational structure is a key enabling condition for building stable, controllable, and situated emotional support systems.