# Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10848 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10848/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 10 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18925/) (2024)
- [MiniCPM4: Ultra-Efficient LLMs on End Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07900/) (2025)
- [DianJin-R1: Evaluating and Enhancing Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15716/) (2025)
- [Evaluating the Efficacy of Interactive Language Therapy Based on LLM for High-Functioning Autistic Adolescent Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09243/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [SWE-QA: Can Language Models Answer Repository-level Code Questions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14635/) (2025)
- [Kardia-R1: Unleashing LLMs to Reason toward Understanding and Empathy for Emotional Support via Rubric-as-Judge Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01282/) (2025)
- [APLOT: Robust Reward Modeling via Adaptive Preference Learning with Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10963/) (2025)
- [Tears or Cheers? Benchmarking LLMs via Culturally Elicited Distinct Affective Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13024/) (2026)
- [One Refiner to Unlock Them All: Inference-Time Reasoning Elicitation via Reinforcement Query Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25444/) (2026)
- [MiraMind: Benchmarking Reliable Mental Health Reasoning beyond Answer Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09636/) (2025)
- [Omni-Perception Policy Optimization for Multimodal Emotion Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25325/) (2026)
- [PsychePass: Calibrating LLM Therapeutic Competence via Trajectory-Anchored Tournaments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20330/) (2026)
- [RAAR: Retrieval Augmented Agentic Reasoning for Cross-Domain Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04853/) (2026)
- [MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03340/) (2026)
- [Beyond Compliance: A Resistance-Informed Motivation Reasoning Framework for Challenging Psychological Client Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10507/) (2026)
- [Surfacing the Unsaid: CUE-Bench for Affective Stance in Chinese Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10810/) (2026)
- [DELTA: Deliberative Multi-Agent Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04112/) (2026)
- [CogEvolution: A Human-like Generative Educational Agent to Simulate Student's Cognitive Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14786/) (2026)
- [Reasoning4Sciences: Bridging Reasoning Language Models to All Scientific Branches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01145/) (2026)
- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)
- [Why It Hurts: Identifying the Drivers of Negative Thoughts in Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28648/) (2026)
- [OneEmo: A Unified Multimodal Reasoning Model for Emotion Perception, Understanding, and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06013/) (2026)
- [VisCache: Visual KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Vision Large Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24063/) (2026)
- [From Pattern Recognizers to Personalized Companions: A Survey of Large Language Models in Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25186/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 logopsychetextitPsyche-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 textitPsyche-R1 across several psychological benchmarks, where our 7B textitPsyche-R1 achieves comparable results to 671B textttDeepSeek-R1.