Couples therapy, or relationship counseling, helps partners resolve conflicts, improve satisfaction, and foster psychological growth. Traditional approaches to training couples therapists, such as textbooks and roleplay, often fail to capture the complexity and emotional nuance of real couple dynamics. We present a novel multimodal, multi-agent simulation system that models multi-party interactions in couples therapy. Informed by our systematic research, this system creates a low-stakes environment for trainee therapists to gain valuable practical experience dealing with the critical demand-withdraw communication cycle across six couple-interaction stages. In an evaluation study involving 21 US-based licensed therapists, participants blind to conditions identified the engineered agent behaviors (i.e., the stages and the demand-withdraw cycle) and rated overall realism and agent responses higher for the experimental system than the baseline. As the first known multi-agent framework for training couples therapists, our work builds the foundation for future research that fuses HCI technologies with couples therapy.

翻译：伴侣治疗（或称关系咨询）旨在帮助伴侣解决冲突、提升满意度并促进心理成长。传统的伴侣治疗师培训方法（如教科书和角色扮演）往往难以捕捉真实伴侣互动中的复杂性与情感细微差异。本文提出了一种新颖的多模态多智能体仿真系统，用于对伴侣治疗中的多方互动进行建模。基于系统性研究，该系统为受训治疗师创建了一个低风险环境，使其能够在六个伴侣互动阶段中处理关键的需求-退缩沟通循环，从而获得宝贵的实践经验。在一项涉及21名美国持证治疗师的评估研究中，在条件盲设下，参与者识别出了所设计的智能体行为（即各阶段及需求-退缩循环），并对实验系统的整体真实性和智能体反应给出了高于基线系统的评分。作为首个已知的用于伴侣治疗师培训的多智能体框架，本研究为未来融合人机交互技术与伴侣治疗的研究奠定了基础。