COMPEER: Controllable Empathetic Reinforcement Reasoning for Emotional Support Conversation

Abstract: Emotional support conversations are crucial for promoting emotional well-being, yet current models often lack deep empathetic reasoning grounded in psychological principles. To address this, we propose controllable empathetic reasoning, which combines natural language reasoning with structured psychological steps. We construct a fine-grained dataset annotated with reasoning correctness and response preferences to enable this capability. To further enhance training, we employ reinforcement learning with a unified process-outcome reward model that delivers precise feedback. To mitigate response repetitiveness from entropy collapse, we introduce personality-based dialogue rewriting and a redundancy-aware reward reweighting strategy. Our approach significantly improves model's emotional support ability, advancing the development of empathetic, human-like support systems.