Wothmag07/counseLLM

TEXT GENERATIONConcurrency Cost:1Model Size:8BQuant:FP8Ctx Length:32kTool Calling:SupportedPublished:Apr 4, 2026License:apache-2.0Architecture:Transformer Open Weights Cold

Wothmag07/counseLLM is an 8 billion parameter conversational support model developed by Gowtham Arulmozhii, fine-tuned from Llama 3.1 8B Instruct. It utilizes a two-stage alignment pipeline, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on 36K counseling examples followed by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on ~2K preference-filtered pairs. This model is specifically designed for empathy-aligned conversational support, excelling in generating empathetic and supportive responses for mental health-related dialogues.

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CounseLLM: Empathy-Aligned Conversational Support

CounseLLM, developed by Gowtham Arulmozhii, is an 8 billion parameter model fine-tuned from Llama 3.1 8B Instruct specifically for empathetic conversational support. It employs a unique two-stage alignment pipeline to achieve its specialized capabilities.

Key Capabilities & Training

  • Empathy-Aligned Responses: Achieves a GPT-4o judge score of 4.88 for Empathy and 4.71 Overall, significantly outperforming its base and SFT stages.
  • Two-Stage Alignment:
    • Stage 1 (SFT): Supervised Fine-Tuning on 36K multi-source counseling examples, including synthetic, clinical, and real human transcripts (e.g., MentalChat16K, empathetic_dialogues, Psych8k).
    • Stage 2 (DPO): Direct Preference Optimization using ~2K preference-filtered pairs from PsychoCounsel-Preference, focusing on improving empathy, safety, relevance, and helpfulness.
  • Optimized for Support: Demonstrates improved perplexity and average response length compared to its base model, indicating more coherent and detailed supportive dialogues.

Intended Use Cases

  • Research and Education: Ideal for studying AI-assisted mental health support and alignment techniques in sensitive domains.
  • Demonstrating Empathy: Useful for showcasing empathy-aligned language model fine-tuning.

Important Limitations

  • Not for Clinical Use: This model is not a substitute for professional mental health care and is explicitly out-of-scope for clinical deployment or crisis intervention. Users should refer to professional services like the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for emergencies.
  • Potential Biases: May reflect biases from its training data and could generate clinically inaccurate advice. Extensive safety review is required for any production use.