The study investigates how a large language model, Gemma-3-27B-PT, internally represents depressive symptoms. By applying mechanistic interpretability methods to the model’s residual stream, researchers found that symptom groups are geometrically distinct at layer 21, and that projected symptom vectors align with clinician-annotated rankings across mood, somatic, and suicidality dimensions. Additionally, a single depression vector at this layer can differentiate depressive from non-depressive text with an AUC of 0.789, suggesting a potential emotional valence gate for symptom projection.
By Fangyi Zhu, Ajay Subramanian, Allison Constant, Camille Wang, Ravish Gupta, Corey J. Keller
arXiv:2607. 25679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal behavioral analysis offers a scalable approach to assessing depression, anxiety, and stress, yet generic fusion models often ignore the psychometric structure of questionnaire labels.
By Shiyu Teng, Haichen Yu, Jiaqing Liu, Hao Sun, Yu Song, Shurong Chai, Ruibo Hou, Lanfen Lin, Yen-Wei Chen
arXiv:2607. 15202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Annotation quality is a major bottleneck in building reliable and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) systems for mental health research.
By Hoang-Loc Cao, Van Pham, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Phuc Truong Loc Nguyen, Phuc Ho, Veronica Whitford, Hung Cao
arXiv:2607. 22794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic depression detection with deep learning has shown promise but often suffers from limited generalization due to domain shift arising from inter-speaker variability.
By Ali Tabaraei, Federico Simonetta, Stavros Ntalampiras
Annotation quality is a major bottleneck in building reliable and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) systems for mental health research. In depression-related datasets, labels are often assigned without structured evidence, symptom-level justification, or traceable alignment with the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), limiting both transparency and downstream model interpretability.
arXiv:2606. 10796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Depression Detection (ADD) from clinical interviews is a pivotal task in computational mental health, yet it remains challenging due to two critical obstacles: 1) difficulty in modeling complex but sparsely distributed depression clues within lengthy, multi-topic clinical interviews, leading to superficial and unreliable reasoning; 2) scarcity of labeled data due to clinical privacy, together with high cost of training and fine-tuning, limiting the deployment of supervised ADD systems.
By Yiqing Lyu, Xianbing Zhao, Buzhou Tang, Ronghuan Jiang
arXiv:2608.21868v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Depression assessment from multimodal clinical interviews requires integrating dispersed evidence from multiple symptoms into a coherent PHQ-8 profile....
By Ao Chen, Xiaojiang Peng
arXiv:2606. 25606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given the widespread prevalence of depression and its consequential impact on individuals and society, it is crucial to obtain objective measures for early diagnosis and intervention.
By Felipe Moreno, Sharifa Alghowinem, Hae Won Park, Cynthia Breazeal
Given the widespread prevalence of depression and its consequential impact on individuals and society, it is crucial to obtain objective measures for early diagnosis and intervention. As a multidisciplinary topic, these objective measures should be interpretable and accessible to health care professionals, ensuring effective collaboration and treatment planning in the realm of mental health care.
arXiv:2608.30857v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Depression and anxiety in older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) are frequently underdiagnosed due to limited access to care. Multimodal a...
By Merna Bibars, Bolaji Omofojoye, Allan I. Levey, Rachel Hershenberg, Gari D. Clifford, Hyeokhyen Kwon
The paper reviews how large language models are applied in mental health, covering areas such as social media analysis, clinical conversational agents, therapy support tools, prompt engineering, and multimodal learning. It synthesizes interdisciplinary studies that use social media posts, electronic medical records, and multimodal inputs to detect depression, assess suicide risk, provide personalized therapy, and generate psychoeducational content. The review also discusses advances in model interpretability, annotation strategies, multimodal fusion techniques, and highlights ethical, sociotechnical, and regulatory challenges while proposing frameworks for safe, equitable, and accountable deployment.
By Yisong Chen, Yifan Gao, Sijing Yu, Chuqing Zhao, Yang Lu
The paper introduces Evidence-Bounded Mental Health Reasoning, addressing the problem that current multimodal mental health screening models treat all clinical speech protocols as equally evidential. It presents the Evidence Package Benchmark, comprising 1,870 annotated packages from six diverse protocols, and proposes EviBound, a protocol-aware framework that limits reasoning to valid evidence using a planner, acoustic consensus, and a boundary critic. EviBound outperforms existing omni-modal baselines, achieving a Depression AUROC of 0.8658 with no claim violations.
By Chengyuan Gao, Jiang Wu, Tao Lu, Jiayan Guo, Mingkun Xu, Tianyi Zang, Shangyang Li