SIC-Agents: Benchmarking and Building an Adaptive Simulator for Pediatric Serious Illness Communication Training
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.29481 (cs)
[Submitted on 30 Aug 2026]
Title:SIC-Agents: Benchmarking and Building an Adaptive Simulator for Pediatric Serious Illness Communication Training
Authors:Zihan Wang, Anita Marie Slominska, Rennie Bimman, Elizabeth Di Flumeri, Amanda Mayappo-Neeposh, Conall Francoeur, Tamara Ellen Carver, Xiao-Wen Chang, Doina Precup, Esin Darici Haritaoglu, Ismail Haritaoglu, Akshatha Arodi, Naomi Goloff
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Abstract:Pediatric serious illness communication (SIC) is critically important, yet scalable communication training for clinicians remains limited. Compared with other dialogue simulation settings, pediatric SIC poses additional challenges, including multi-party interactions, response to parental distress and strong dependence on feedback dynamics. Existing LLM-based simulators optimize generic dialogue quality rather than curriculum-contingent behavior required for effective SIC training. In collaboration with educators and pediatric clinicians, we introduce the first benchmark suite and simulation framework tailored to pediatric SIC training. Our benchmarks, PitfallBench and DialogueBench, evaluate simulators both at the turn-level and across full dialogues. We further propose SIC-Agents, a self-improving framework that generates a clinician-editable skill document to guide simulator behavior. Our experiments show that SIC-Agents outperforms static expert prompting. To support future research, we release our benchmarks for parent simulation in pediatric SIC at this https URL
| Comments: | Accepted to EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.29481 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.29481v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29481
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled SIC-Agents: Benchmarking and Building an Adaptive Simulator for Pediatric Serious Illness Communication Training, by Zihan Wang and 11 other authors
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