Can LLMs diagnose and treat mental health?
MentalArena: Self-play Training of Language Models for Diagnosis and Treatment of Mental Health Disorders
October 10, 2024
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06845This paper introduces MentalArena, a framework for training Language Models to diagnose and suggest treatments for mental health disorders.
Key takeaways for LLM-based multi-agent systems:
- Self-Play for Healthcare Data: MentalArena uses a novel self-play approach to generate synthetic patient-therapist conversations, addressing the challenge of limited real-world data due to privacy concerns.
- Symptom Encoder: This module generates realistic patient descriptions by combining cognitive models (based on CBT principles) and learned behavior patterns.
- Symptom Decoder: It analyzes patient-therapist dialogues to detect and mitigate "intent bias" – misunderstandings that can occur in such conversations.
- Promising Results: MentalArena outperforms strong baselines (including GPT-4) on several benchmark tasks, showing the potential of this approach for healthcare applications.