ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversations

Researchers introduced ESC-Skills, a framework for emotional support conversations that turns support behavior into reusable, executable skills.

It identifies localized interaction patterns as intervention units, builds an ESC-Skills Bank, and refines skills with simulated seeker profiles.

By analyzing successful and failed dialogues, the system spots missing or unsafe behaviors and uses simulation-based verification to improve them.

The goal is to make emotional support chatbots more interpretable, controllable, and effective across different user profiles.