The paper investigates the interpretability of Domain-Adapted Prompt-based Fine-tuning (DAPF) models for dementia detection from spoken language. Using probing and analysis techniques, the authors find that DAPF achieves strong overall performance (accuracy = 0.83, macro‑F1 = 0.83) and that the diagnosis is most recoverable from its [MASK] representation. However, token‑level explanations derived from DAPF are largely driven by language‑task vocabulary, discourse markers, and transcription artifacts, and perturbation tests reveal weak or negative effects, indicating that the masked‑token interface captures diagnosis information without providing faithful token‑level explanations.
arXiv:2602. 11177v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is challenging, particularly due to the limited availability of labeled data.
arXiv:2606. 30675v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early detection of dementia through speech analysis offers a non-invasive screening alternative, but capturing both acoustic and linguistic biomarkers remains challenging.
arXiv:2606. 28445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early detection of dementia enables timely intervention, and reflecting cognitive impairment, spontaneous speech offers a non-invasive screening modality.
The paper examines why speech‑based screening for Alzheimer’s disease fails to generalize across different languages, tasks, and recording protocols. Using a leave‑one‑corpus‑out evaluation on four datasets, it finds that 59 of 70 interpretable speech features show conflicting patterns between healthy controls and cognitive risk groups, with pause, silence, and speech rate being highly protocol‑sensitive. The authors propose a fusion method that combines XLM‑R text baseline scores with evidence anchors, improving mean speaker AUC to 0.785 and worst‑case AUC to 0.615, and emphasize the importance of auditing feature transferability and reporting worst‑case domain robustness.
arXiv:2607. 23977v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Acoustic biomarkers show promise for detecting Alzheimer's Disease (AD), yet whether the cues driving diagnostic AI align with those salient to human listeners is underexplored across languages and genders, where pathological markers and perceptual strategies differ.
arXiv:2606. 30646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech recruits the same executive, attentional, and working memory processes underlying instrumental activities of daily living, or IADLs, providing a non-invasive proxy for cognitive assessment.
The paper introduces a unified pre‑training framework for medical representations that incorporates hierarchical sub‑token aggregation, partial masking, and cross‑reference mechanisms to better capture the structure of medical codes. The resulting model outperforms existing BERT‑based approaches on pre‑training tasks and downstream clinical predictions, such as dementia onset and hospitalization. An in‑silico drug repositioning study for Alzheimer’s disease demonstrates the framework’s ability to rediscover known drugs and prioritize new hypotheses without external literature, establishing a workflow for hypothesis generation and prioritization based on observational data.
arXiv:2607. 10168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: It is still hard to find Alzheimer's disease (AD) early, especially when neuroimaging is expensive or tools that depend on language are not available.
The paper introduces LLM-Anchored Paralinguistic Enrichment (LAPE), a method that enhances language model representations with speech-based paralinguistic cues such as pauses and word elongations. LAPE incorporates three innovations: prosodic event textualization, lexico-prosodic unitization and chunking, and text-anchored paralinguistic fusion using NormGate. Evaluations on the ADReSS and ADReSSo datasets show that LAPE achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance in detecting Alzheimer’s disease from speech.
arXiv:2606. 27679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probe-based uncertainty estimation (UE) has emerged as a prominent approach to detect hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning uncertainty from internal model signals.
Supervised fine-tuning with synthetic rationale data is widely assumed to improve language model performance on clinical prediction tasks by teaching models not just what to predict but why. We test this assumption on five-year Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) prediction from longitudinal health histories.
arXiv:2608.29582v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) primarily focus on factual knowledge retrieval, overlooking the fundamental challenge of navigati...