# DELTA: Deliberative Multi-Agent Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Psychological Counseling

Source: [DELTA: Deliberative Multi-Agent Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Psychological Counseling](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/69842409a8b01e76cc8ee716>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-02-06T05:00:04.455Z

Authors: Jiangnan Yang, Junjie Chen, Fei Wang, Yiqi Nie, Yuxin Liu, Zhangling Duan, Jie Chen

Published: 2026-02-04T00:56:05.000Z

## Abstract

Psychological counseling is a fundamentally multimodal cognitive process in which clinicians integrate verbal content with visual and vocal cues to infer clients' mental states and respond empathically. However, most existing language-model-based counseling systems operate on text alone and rely on implicit mental state inference. We introduce DELTA, a deliberative multi-agent framework that models counseling as a structured reasoning process over multimodal signals, separating evidence grounding, mental state abstraction, and response generation. DELTA further incorporates reinforcement learning guided by a distribution-level Emotion Attunement Score to encourage emotionally attuned responses. Experiments on a multimodal counseling benchmark show that DELTA improves both counseling quality and emotion attunement across models. Ablation and qualitative analyses suggest that explicit multimodal reasoning and structured mental state representations play complementary roles in supporting empathic human-AI interaction.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Counseling Quality on MESC](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/counseling-quality-on-mesc.md>): Counseling Quality; MESC; Comprehensiveness: 50.

- [Emotion Attunement on MESC](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/emotion-attunement-on-mesc.md>): Emotion Attunement; MESC; Video Score: 40.03.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04112>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.04112.pdf>)