MoPHES:Leveraging on-device LLMs as Agent for Mobile Psychological Health Evaluation and Support

Abstract: The 2022 World Mental Health Report calls for global mental health care reform, amid rising prevalence of issues like anxiety and depression that affect nearly one billion people worldwide. Traditional in-person therapy fails to meet this demand, and the situation is worsened by stigma. While general-purpose LLMs offer efficiency for AI-driven mental health solutions, they underperform because they lack specialized fine-tuning. Existing LLM-based mental health chatbots can engage in empathetic conversations, but they overlook real-time user mental state assessment which is critical for professional counseling. This paper proposes MoPHES, a framework that integrates mental state evaluation, conversational support, and professional treatment recommendations. The agent developed under this framework uses two fine-tuned MiniCPM4-0.5B LLMs: one is fine-tuned on mental health conditions datasets to assess users' mental states and predict the severity of anxiety and depression; the other is fine-tuned on multi-turn dialogues to handle conversations with users. By leveraging insights into users' mental states, our agent provides more tailored support and professional treatment recommendations. Both models are also deployed directly on mobile devices to enhance user convenience and protect user privacy. Additionally, to evaluate the performance of MoPHES with other LLMs, we develop a benchmark for the automatic evaluation of mental state prediction and multi-turn counseling dialogues, which includes comprehensive evaluation metrics, datasets, and methods.