Neuro-Sym Supporter: A Thoughtful Emotion Support Agent Integrating Neural and Symbolic Policy Learning

Abstract

LLM-based empathetic dialogue systems enhance agents' emotional support capabilities. Previous approaches primarily relied on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to extract key dialogue cues and further strengthened the agent's sensitivity to these signals through supervised fine-tuning. However, such methods overly depend on the information extraction capability of LLMs, leading to unstable reasoning and limited interpretability. To simultaneously improve an agent's ability to proactively explore solutions through rational reasoning while attending to users' sensitive emotions via empathetic understanding, we propose Neuro-Sym Supporter, a hybrid decision-making emotional support agent that integrates symbolic reasoning with deep learning. This model combines rational inference with emotional empathy, enabling the agent to generate supportive responses that balance logic and emotion. Specifically, we introduce Sym-Mind, a differentiable logic-based reasoning framework for emotional support strategy selection, which unifies interpretability with stable performance. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms multiple competitive baselines in both automatic and human evaluations, validating its effectiveness.