Beyond Compliance: A Resistance-Informed Motivation Reasoning Framework for Challenging Psychological Client Simulation
Psychological client simulators have emerged as a scalable solution for training and evaluating counselor trainees and psychological LLMs. Yet existing simulators exhibit unrealistic over-compliance, leaving counselors underprepared for the challenging behaviors common in real-world practice. To bridge this gap, we present ResistClient, which systematically models challenging client behaviors grounded in Client Resistance Theory by integrating external behaviors with underlying motivational mechanisms. To this end, we propose Resistance-Informed Motivation Reasoning (RIMR), a two-stage training framework. First, RIMR mitigates compliance bias via supervised fine-tuning on RPC, a large-sca...
| Authors | Danni Liu, Bo Liu, Yuxin Hu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 12 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 April 2026 |
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