3 papers
cs.CL2026
Assessing Risks of Large Language Models in Mental Health Support: A Framework for Automated Clinical AI Red Teaming
Ian Steenstra, Paola Pedrelli, Weiyan Shi +2
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized for mental health support; however, current safety benchmarks often fail to detect the complex, longitudinal risks inherent i…
cs.CL2025
A Risk Ontology for Evaluating AI-Powered Psychotherapy Virtual Agents
Ian Steenstra, Timothy W. Bickmore
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Intelligent Virtual Agents acting as psychotherapists presents significant opportunities for expanding mental healthcare acces…
cs.HC2025
Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations
Ian Steenstra, Farnaz Nouraei, Timothy W. Bickmore
Learning therapeutic counseling involves significant role-play experience with mock patients, with current manual training methods providing only intermittent granular feedback. We…