MIND: An Evidence-State Decision Interface for Criteria-Grounded Psychiatric Inquiry and Diagnosis

Guoyi Li, Shihao Xu, Jiatong Ma, Zhongjiang Yao, Yunyun Han, Jianhua Chen, Yafeng Deng


Abstract
Psychiatric consultation requires agents to elicit discriminative evidence, map uncertain narratives to diagnostic criteria, and decide when evidence suffices. Existing dialogue and retrieval-augmented systems condition policies on raw histories or appended passages, leaving observed evidence, missing checks, differentials, and support reliability entangled. We introduce MIND, a criteria-grounded evidence-state decision interface. At each turn, MIND constructs a typed state containing observed evidence, unresolved criterion checks, active differentials, criterion-linked supports, and reliability metadata. A training-split Psychiatric Reasoning Bank supplies gated supports, turning retrieval into state construction rather than prompt injection. The same state conditions action selection, process rewards, information-gain scoring, and trajectory rectification. Under EMR-grounded simulator protocols, MIND improves accuracy by 8.8 and 7.3 points over strong inference-only, RAG, and RL baselines, with gains transferring to public MDD-5k dialogues. Matched interventions attribute these gains to the shared state rather than prompt length, retrieval text, or formatting. MIND targets screening-level decision support, not autonomous diagnosis. Code is available at https://github.com/Lingxi-mental-health/MIND.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1417
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
32348–32378
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1417/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guoyi Li, Shihao Xu, Jiatong Ma, Zhongjiang Yao, Yunyun Han, Jianhua Chen, and Yafeng Deng. 2026. MIND: An Evidence-State Decision Interface for Criteria-Grounded Psychiatric Inquiry and Diagnosis. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 32348–32378, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MIND: An Evidence-State Decision Interface for Criteria-Grounded Psychiatric Inquiry and Diagnosis (Li et al., EMNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1417.pdf