Agnès Helme-Guizon


2026

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a widely validated approach to behavior change, but existing virtual MI agents operate only in one-on-one settings, ignoring the cost-effectiveness and peer-support dynamics of group MI. We present a simulation environment and reinforcement learning (RL) based dialogue manager for group MI, in which a discrete Soft-Actor-Critic (SAC) policy selects therapist dialogue acts and a large language model generates utterances, with two LLM-prompted patient agents as interlocutors. Our model supports adaptation to different participant profiles. We compared our dialogue manager with four LLM-based ones at the dialogue acts level. We observed that RL yields a significantly different therapist policy, which showed the tendency to generate more directive acts and adapt to varying group compositions. Participant profile adaptation was the strongest in groups containing an open-to-change participant.