Yongfeng Tao

Author directory

2026

Large language models show potential for scalable mental-health support by simulating Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) counselors. However, existing methods often rely on static cognitive profiles and omniscient single-agent simulation, failing to capture the dynamic, information-asymmetric nature of real therapy. We introduce CCD-CBT, a multi-agent framework that shifts CBT simulation along two axes: 1) from a static to a dynamically reconstructed Cognitive Conceptualization Diagram (CCD), updated by a dedicated Control Agent, and 2) from omniscient to information-asymmetric interaction, where the Therapist Agent must reason from inferred client states. We release CCDChat, a synthetic multi-turn CBT dataset generated under this framework. Evaluations with clinical scales and expert therapists show that models fine-tuned on CCDChat outperform strong baselines in both counseling fidelity and positive-affect enhancement, with ablations validating dynamic CCD guidance and diagnostic analysis supporting asymmetric interaction design. Our work offers a new paradigm for building theory-grounded, clinically-plausible conversational agents.