Xin Wang
Publications
Mental-R1: Aligning LLM Reasoning for Mental Health Assessment
Mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicide remain urgent global challenges, where timely and accurate assessment is critical for effective intervention. Recently, large language models have been explored for mental health assessment. However, existing general-purpose post-training methods do not align with the cognitive processes of human assessment, which may lead to unreliable reasoning outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose Cognitive Relative Policy Optimization (CRPO), a reinforcement learning framework tailored for the mental health domain. CRPO extends group relative policy optimization by integrating stage-dependent uncertainty modeling into the policy optimization process. Specifically, we introduce a stage-wise entropy regularization mechanism that encourages broad exploration in early reasoning phases and progressively enforces confident decision-making in later stages, mimicking the human cognitive shift from uncertainty to certainty. In addition, inspired by cognitive appraisal theory, we formalize cognitive reasoning stages, thereby guiding theory-grounded interpretable inference. Experiments on 8 mental health datasets show that CRPO achieves an average improvement of 10.4 percentage points in weighted F1-score over the best reinforcement learning baseline. Furthermore, the CRPO-trained model Mental-R1 demonstrates clear advantages compared with existing large language models on reasoning-intensive cases, suggesting that CRPO enhances reasoning capabilities for mental health assessment.
Cite-While-You-Generate: Training-Free Evidence Attribution for Multimodal Clinical Summarization
Trustworthy clinical summarization requires not only fluent generation but also transparency about where each statement comes from. We propose a training-free framework for generation-time source attribution that leverages decoder attentions to directly cite supporting text spans or images, overcoming the limitations of post-hoc or retraining-based methods. We introduce two strategies for multimodal attribution: a raw image mode, which directly uses image patch attentions, and a caption-as-span mode, which substitutes images with generated captions to enable purely text-based alignment. Evaluations on two representative domains: clinician-patient dialogues (CliConSummation) and radiology reports (MIMIC-CXR), show that our approach consistently outperforms embedding-based and self-attribution baselines, improving both text-level and multimodal attribution accuracy (e.g., +15% F1 over embedding baselines). Caption-based attribution achieves competitive performance with raw-image attention while being more lightweight and practical. These findings highlight attention-guided attribution as a promising step toward interpretable and deployable clinical summarization systems.