Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning
About
Amidst a shortage of qualified mental health professionals, the integration of large language models (LLMs) into psychological applications offers a promising way to alleviate the growing burden of mental health disorders. Recent reasoning-augmented LLMs have achieved remarkable performance in mathematics and programming, while research in the psychological domain has predominantly emphasized emotional support and empathetic dialogue, with limited attention to reasoning mechanisms that are beneficial to generating accurate responses. Therefore, in this paper, we propose \logopsyche\textit{Psyche-R1}, the first Chinese psychological LLM that jointly integrates empathy, psychological expertise, and reasoning, built upon a novel data curation pipeline. Specifically, we design a comprehensive data synthesis pipeline that produces over 75k high-quality psychological questions paired with detailed rationales, generated through an iterative prompt-rationale optimization procedure, along with 73k empathetic dialogues. Subsequently, we employ a hybrid training strategy wherein challenging samples are identified through a multi-LLM cross-selection strategy for group relative policy optimization (GRPO) to improve reasoning ability, while the remaining data are used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance empathetic response generation and psychological domain knowledge. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of \textit{Psyche-R1} across several psychological benchmarks, where our 7B \textit{Psyche-R1} achieves comparable results to 671B \texttt{DeepSeek-R1}.