Beyond Compliance: A Resistance-Informed Motivation Reasoning Framework for Challenging Psychological Client Simulation

arXiv:2604.10507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Psychological client simulators have emerged as a scalable solution for training and evaluating counselor trainees and psychological LLMs. Yet existing simulators exhibit unrealistic over-compliance, leaving counselors underprepared for the challenging behaviors common in real-world practice. To bridge this gap, we present ResistClient, which systematically models challenging client behaviors grounded in Client Resistance Theory by integrating exte