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

ArXi:2605.27908v1 Announce Type: cross Existing emotional conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little for systematic skill improvement. We propose ESC-Skills, a skill-centric framework that discovers and self-evolves executable emotional skills. We first model localized interactions as Intervention Units (IUs), which capture state--action--outcome dynamics between seeker states, interventions, and post-response emotional changes.