Large language model (LLM) dialogue agents are increasingly used in psychological therapy, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. We address this gap with three contributions: (1) MindEval, a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents; (2) MindData, a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues (2,573 sessions; 63,348 turns); and (3) MindApt, a framework that integrates a therapeutic dialogue state tracking paradigm with a patient-aware strategic planning module. On MindEval, MindApt outperforms strong baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. To evaluate utility beyond role-play, we conducted a clinical study with real patients, demonstrating that MindApt-guided care achieves outcomes comparable to therapist-determined care, while the hybrid setting combining therapist judgment with MindApt’s recommendations yields the strongest overall outcomes.

While recent research increasingly emphasizes the value of human-LLM collaboration in competitive programming and proposes numerous empirical methods, a comprehensive understanding remains elusive due to the fragmented nature of existing studies and their use of diverse, application-specific human feedback. Thus, our work serves a three-fold purpose: First, we present the first taxonomy of human feedback consolidating the entire programming process, which promotes fine-grained evaluation. Second, we introduce ELABORATIONSET, a novel programming dataset specifically designed for human-LLM collaboration, meticulously annotated to enable large-scale simulated human feedback and facilitate cost-effective real human interaction studies. Third, we introduce ELABORATION, a novel benchmark to facilitate a thorough assessment of human-LLM competitive programming. With ELABORATION, we pinpoint strengthes and weaknesses of existing methods, thereby setting the foundation for furture improvement. Our dataset and code will be openly released.