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arXiv · 2602.08826

Affective Flow Language Model for Emotional Support Conversation

Chenghui Zou·Ning Wang·Tiesunlong Shen·Luwei Xiao·Chuan Ma·Xiangpeng Li·Rui Mao·Erik Cambria
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Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to emotional support conversation (ESC). However, complex multi-turn support remains challenging.This is because existing alignment schemes rely on sparse outcome-level signals, thus offering limited supervision for intermediate strategy decisions. To fill this gap, this paper proposes affective flow language model for emotional support conversation (AFlow), a framework that introduces fine-grained supervision on dialogue prefixes by modeling a continuous affective flow along multi-turn trajectories. AFlow can estimate intermediate utility over searched trajectories and learn preference-consistent strategy transitions. To improve strategy coherence and empathetic response quality, a subpath-level flow-balance objective is presented to propagate preference signals to intermediate states. Experiment results show consistent and significant improvements over competitive baselines in diverse emotional contexts. Remarkably, AFlow with a compact open-source backbone outperforms proprietary LMMs such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 on major ESC metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/chz2025/AffectiveFlow.

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Chenghui Zou, Ning Wang, Tiesunlong Shen, Luwei Xiao, Chuan Ma, Xiangpeng Li, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria. 2026-02-09. Affective Flow Language Model for Emotional Support Conversation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08826

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