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EMNLP Findings2025

MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue

Yujia Chen, Changsong Li, Yiming Wang, Tianjie Ju, Qingqing Xiao, Nan Zhang, Zifan Kong, Peng Wang, Binyu Yan

Abstract

Mental health issues are worsening in today's competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. Traditional healings like counseling and chatbots fail to engage effectively, they often provide generic responses lacking emotional depth. Although large language models (LLMs) have the potential to create more human-like interactions, they still struggle to capture subtle emotions. This requires LLMs to be equipped with human-like adaptability and warmth. To fill this gap, we propose the MIND (Multi-agent INner Dialogue), a novel paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. Considering the strong generative and role-playing ability of LLM agents, we predefine an interactive healing framework and assign LLM agents different roles within the framework to engage in interactive inner dialogues with users, thereby providing an immersive healing experience. We conduct extensive human experiments in various real-world healing dimensions, and find that MIND provides a more user-friendly experience than traditional paradigms. This demonstrates that MIND effectively leverages the significant potential of LLMs in psychological healing.

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Cited by top-tier papers3

  1. MetaMind: Modeling Human Social Thoughts with Metacognitive Multi-Agent SystemsXuanming Zhang, Yuxuan Chen, Samuel (Min-Hsuan) Yeh, Sharon LiNeurIPS 2025 · 14 citations
  2. When Nobody Around Is Real: Exploring Public Opinions and User Experiences On the Multi-Agent AI Social PlatformQiufang Yu, Mengmeng Wu, Xingyu LanCHI 2026 · 2 citations
  3. Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware PlanningXinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang et al.ACL 2026

Builds on13

  1. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
  2. CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model SocietyGuohao Li, Hasan Hammoud, Hani Itani, Dmitrii Khizbullin et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 1,975 citations
  3. HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging FaceYongliang Shen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Dongsheng Li et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 1,778 citations
  4. Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A SurveyJie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan ChangACL Findings 2023 · 428 citations
  5. Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent DebateTian Liang, Zhiwei He, Wenxiang Jiao, Xing Wang et al.EMNLP 2024 · 177 citations

Related papers

  1. MindfulAgents: Personalizing Mindfulness Meditation via an Expert-Aligned Multi-Agent SystemMengyuan Millie Wu, Zhihan Jiang, Yuang Fan, Richard Feng et al.CHI 2026 · 1 citation
  2. HealMe: Harnessing Cognitive Reframing in Large Language Models for PsychotherapyMengxi Xiao, Qianqian Xie, Ziyan Kuang, Zhicheng Liu et al.ACL 2024
  3. An LLM-based Simulation Framework for Embodied Conversational Agents in Psychological CounselingLixiu Wu, Yuanrong Tang, Qisen Pan, Xianyang Zhan et al.AAAI 2026 · 1 citation
  4. Exploring User Security and Privacy Attitudes and Concerns Toward the Use of General-Purpose LLM Chatbots for Mental HealthJabari Kwesi, Jiaxun Cao, Riya Manchanda, Pardis Emami NaeiniUSENIX Security 2025
  5. CogEmp: A Cognitive Empathy-Oriented Dialogue System for Structured Psychological CounselingYiguo Deng, Xia Lei, Yuan Zhang, Long YeACL Findings 2026
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