AI RESEARCH
UTS at PsyDefDetect: Multi-Agent Councils and Absence-Based Reasoning for Defense Mechanism Classification
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2605.09769v1 Announce Type: new This paper describes our system for classifying psychological defense mechanisms in emotional dialogues using the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS), placing second (F1 0.406) among 64 teams.1 A central insight is that defense mechanisms are defined by what is absent: missing affect, blocked cognition, denied reality. We encode this as an affect-cognition integration spectrum in prompt-level clinical rules, which account for the largest single gain (+11.4pp F1.