{"ID":2877289,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20996","arxiv_id":"2508.20996","title":"ChatThero: An LLM-Supported Chatbot for Behavior Change and Therapeutic Support in Addiction Recovery","abstract":"Substance use disorders (SUDs) affect millions of people, and relapses are common, requiring multi-session treatments. Access to care is limited, which contributes to the challenge of recovery support. We present \\textbf{ChatThero}, an innovative low-cost, multi-session, stressor-aware, and memory-persistent autonomous \\emph{language agent} designed to facilitate long-term behavior change and therapeutic support in addiction recovery. Unlike existing work that mostly finetuned large language models (LLMs) on patient-therapist conversation data, ChatThero was trained in a multi-agent simulated environment that mirrors real therapy. We created anonymized patient profiles from recovery communities (e.g., Reddit). We classify patients as \\texttt{easy}, \\texttt{medium}, and \\texttt{difficult}, three scales representing their resistance to recovery. We created an external environment by introducing stressors (e.g., social determinants of health) to simulate real-world situations. We dynamically inject clinically-grounded therapeutic strategies (motivational interview and cognitive behavioral therapy). Our evaluation, conducted by both human (blinded clinicians) and LLM-as-Judge, shows that ChatThero is superior in empathy and clinical relevance. We show that stressor simulation improves robustness of ChatThero. Explicit stressors increase relapse-like setbacks, matching real-world patterns. We evaluate ChatThero with behavioral change metrics. On a 1--5 scale, ChatThero raises \\texttt{motivation} by $+1.71$ points (from $2.39$ to $4.10$) and \\texttt{confidence} by $+1.67$ points (from $1.52$ to $3.19$), substantially outperforming GPT-5. On \\texttt{difficult} patients, ChatThero reaches the success milestone with $26\\%$ fewer turns than GPT-5.","short_abstract":"Substance use disorders (SUDs) affect millions of people, and relapses are common, requiring multi-session treatments. Access to care is limited, which contributes to the challenge of recovery support. We present \\textbf{ChatThero}, an innovative low-cost, multi-session, stressor-aware, and memory-persistent autonomous...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20996","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20996v2","authors":"[\"Junda Wang\",\"Zonghai Yao\",\"Lingxi Li\",\"Junhui Qian\",\"Zhichao Yang\",\"Hong Yu\"]","published":"2025-08-28T16:57:33Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}