[A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61.pdf)
[Alafate Abulimiti](/people/alafate-abulimiti/unverified/),
[Vladislav Maraev](/people/vladislav-maraev/unverified/),
[Agnès Helme-Guizon](/people/agnes-helme-guizon/unverified/),
[Catherine Pelachaud](/people/catherine-pelachaud/)
Abstract
Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a widely validated approach to behavior change, but existing virtual MI agents operate only in one-on-one settings, ignoring the cost-effectiveness and peer-support dynamics of group MI. We present a simulation environment and reinforcement learning (RL) based dialogue manager for group MI, in which a discrete Soft-Actor-Critic (SAC) policy selects therapist dialogue acts and a large language model generates utterances, with two LLM-prompted patient agents as interlocutors. Our model supports adaptation to different participant profiles. We compared our dialogue manager with four LLM-based ones at the dialogue acts level. We observed that RL yields a significantly different therapist policy, which showed the tendency to generate more directive acts and adapt to varying group compositions. Participant profile adaptation was the strongest in groups containing an open-to-change participant.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.sigdial-1.61
- Volume:
[Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue](/volumes/2026.sigdial-1/)- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Atlanta, Georgia, USA
- Editors:
[Jinho D. Choi](/people/jinho-d-choi/),[Yun-Nung Chen](/people/yun-nung-chen/),[Kotaro Funakoshi](/people/kotaro-funakoshi/),[Ali Emami](/people/ali-emami/)- Venue:
[SIGDIAL](/venues/sigdial/)- SIG:
[SIGDIAL](/sigs/sigdial/)- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 871–890
- Language:
- URL:
[https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/)- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Alafate Abulimiti, Vladislav Maraev, Agnès Helme-Guizon, and Catherine Pelachaud. 2026. A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing. InProceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 871–890, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics. - Cite (Informal):
[A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/)(Abulimiti et al., SIGDIAL 2026)- PDF:
[https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61.pdf)