PSY-STEP: Structuring Therapeutic Targets and Action Sequences for Proactive Counseling Dialogue Systems

arXiv:2604.04448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) aims to identify and restructure automatic negative thoughts pertaining to involuntary interpretations of events, yet existing counseling agents struggle to identify and address them in dialogue settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce STEP, a dataset that models CBT counseling by explicitly reflecting automatic thoughts alongside dynamic, action-level counseling sequences. Using this dataset, we train STEPPER,