PsychAgent: An Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning Agent for Self-Evolving Psychological Counselor

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00931v2
• Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:22:11 GMT
• Title: PsychAgent: An Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning Agent for Self-Evolving Psychological Counselor
• Abstract summary: We propose an Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning Agent (textttPsychAgent) for psychological counseling.<n>First, we establish a Memory-Augmented Planning Engine tailored for longitudinal multi-session interactions.<n>Second, we design a Skill Evolution Engine that extracts new practice-grounded skills from historical counseling trajectories.<n>Third, we introduce a Reinforced Internalization Engine that integrates the evolved skills into the model.
• Score: 27.91498114470285
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Existing methods for AI psychological counselors predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning using static dialogue datasets. However, this contrasts with human experts, who continuously refine their proficiency through clinical practice and accumulated experience. To bridge this gap, we propose an Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning Agent (\texttt{PsychAgent}) for psychological counseling. First, we establish a Memory-Augmented Planning Engine tailored for longitudinal multi-session interactions, which ensures therapeutic continuity through persistent memory and strategic planning. Second, to support self-evolution, we design a Skill Evolution Engine that extracts new practice-grounded skills from historical counseling trajectories. Finally, we introduce a Reinforced Internalization Engine that integrates the evolved skills into the model via rejection fine-tuning, aiming to improve performance across diverse scenarios. Comparative analysis shows that our approach achieves higher scores than strong general LLMs (e.g., GPT-5.4, Gemini-3) and domain-specific baselines across all reported evaluation dimensions. These results suggest that lifelong learning can improve the consistency and overall quality of multi-session counseling responses.

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