{"slug": "a-reinforcement-learning-based-facilitator-for-simulated-group-motivational", "title": "A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing", "summary": "Researchers from Sorbonne Université and CNRS have developed the first reinforcement learning-based dialogue manager for simulated group motivational interviewing, using a discrete Soft-Actor-Critic policy to select therapist acts and LLM-generated utterances. The system, presented at SIGDIAL 2026, outperformed four LLM-based baselines by generating more directive acts and adapting to participant profiles, particularly in groups with an open-to-change participant.", "body_md": "[A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61.pdf)\n\n[Alafate Abulimiti](/people/alafate-abulimiti/unverified/),\n[Vladislav Maraev](/people/vladislav-maraev/unverified/),\n[Agnès Helme-Guizon](/people/agnes-helme-guizon/unverified/),\n[Catherine Pelachaud](/people/catherine-pelachaud/)\n\n##### Abstract\n\nMotivational 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:\n- 2026.sigdial-1.61\n- Volume:\n[Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue](/volumes/2026.sigdial-1/)- Month:\n- August\n- Year:\n- 2026\n- Address:\n- Atlanta, Georgia, USA\n- Editors:\n[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:\n[SIGDIAL](/venues/sigdial/)- SIG:\n[SIGDIAL](/sigs/sigdial/)- Publisher:\n- Association for Computational Linguistics\n- Note:\n- Pages:\n- 871–890\n- Language:\n- URL:\n[https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/)- DOI:\n- Cite (ACL):\n- Alafate Abulimiti, Vladislav Maraev, Agnès Helme-Guizon, and Catherine Pelachaud. 2026.\n[A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/). In*Proceedings 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):\n[A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/)(Abulimiti et al., SIGDIAL 2026)- PDF:\n[https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61.pdf)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-reinforcement-learning-based-facilitator-for-simulated-group-motivational", "canonical_source": "https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.61/", "published_at": "2026-07-21 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-21 20:15:40.859752+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "large-language-models", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": ["Alafate Abulimiti", "Vladislav Maraev", "Agnès Helme-Guizon", "Catherine Pelachaud", "Sorbonne Université", "CNRS", "SIGDIAL", "Association for Computational Linguistics"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-reinforcement-learning-based-facilitator-for-simulated-group-motivational", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-reinforcement-learning-based-facilitator-for-simulated-group-motivational.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-reinforcement-learning-based-facilitator-for-simulated-group-motivational.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-reinforcement-learning-based-facilitator-for-simulated-group-motivational.jsonld"}}