ESC-Skills:发现与自我进化的情感支持对话技能
阅读原文· arxiv.org本文提出ESC-Skills框架,以解决情感支持对话系统可解释性不足与技能改进缺乏体系的问题。该框架首先将局部交互建模为干预单元(IUs),刻画寻求者状态、支持干预与情绪变化间的动态。基于从成功与失败对话中提取的IUs,构建了包含干预指导、适用条件、预期结果与潜在风险的可执行技能库。为进一步提升鲁棒性,框架引入了基于SAGE评估的多角色自我进化精炼流程,通过模拟不同寻求者画像来识别缺失技能与不安全干预,并据此更新技能库。实验证明,该框架在响应质量和对话级情感结果上均有提升,提供了更可解释和可控的支持行为。
Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little support for systematic skill improvement. We propose ESC-Skills, a skill-centric framework that discovers and self-evolves executable emotional support skills. We first model localized support interactions as Intervention Units (IUs), which capture state--action--outcome dynamics between seeker states, support interventions, and post-response emotional changes. Based on IUs extracted from both successful and failed ESC dialogues, we construct the ESC-Skills Bank, a repository of executable emotional support skills containing intervention guidance, applicability conditions, expected outcomes, and potential risks. To further improve robustness, we introduce a multi-profile self-evolutionary refinement framework in which an ESC agent interacts with diverse simulated seeker profiles under SAGE evaluation. The resulting interaction traces are analyzed to identify missing skills, unsafe interventions, and profile-specific failure patterns, which are then used to refine the Skills Bank through simulation-based verification. Experimental results demonstrate that ESC-Skills improves both response-level quality and dialogue-level emotional outcomes while providing more interpretable and controllable support behaviors. We will release the code, prompts, and ESC-Skills Bank at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.