@inproceedings{dai-etal-2026-psyche,
title = "Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological {LLM}s through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning",
author = "Dai, Chongyuan and
Hu, Jinpeng and
Shi, Hongchang and
Li, Zhuo and
Guo, Dan and
Yang, Xun and
Wang, Meng",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1141/",
pages = "24889--24906",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "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 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 and 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 Psyche-R1 across several psychological benchmarks, where our 7B Psyche-R1 achieves comparable results to 671B DeepSeek-R1."
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<abstract>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 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 and 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 Psyche-R1 across several psychological benchmarks, where our 7B Psyche-R1 achieves comparable results to 671B DeepSeek-R1.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning
%A Dai, Chongyuan
%A Hu, Jinpeng
%A Shi, Hongchang
%A Li, Zhuo
%A Guo, Dan
%A Yang, Xun
%A Wang, Meng
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F dai-etal-2026-psyche
%X 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 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 and 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 Psyche-R1 across several psychological benchmarks, where our 7B Psyche-R1 achieves comparable results to 671B DeepSeek-R1.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1141/
%P 24889-24906
Markdown (Informal)
[Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1141/) (Dai et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Chongyuan Dai, Jinpeng Hu, Hongchang Shi, Zhuo Li, Dan Guo, Xun Yang, and Meng Wang. 2026. Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24889–24906, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.