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

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] PsychAgent: An Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning Agent for Self-Evolving Psychological Counselor Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Qianjun Pan, Jie Zhou, Kai Chen, Qin Chen, Jingyuan Zhao, Ningning Zhou, Xin Li, Liang He 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. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.00931 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.00931v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.00931 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jie Zhou [view email] [v1] Wed, 1 Apr 2026 14:08:49 UTC (3,639 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)