arXiv AI

Mitigating Stethoscope-Induced Shortcuts in Respiratory Sound Classification under Federated Domain Generalization with Causality-Inspired Interventions

The paper introduces BTS-CAFE, a federated domain generalization framework for respiratory sound classification that addresses stethoscope-induced shortcuts. It combines causality-inspired device-style interventions, counterfactual metadata augmentation, and gradient alignment to reduce style–content entanglement and promote device-invariant decision boundaries. Experiments on ICBHI and SPRSound datasets show a 3.69‑point improvement in out-of-distribution performance over the baseline and outperform conventional data augmentation and federated learning methods.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Parameter isolation with domain-specific experts for incremental audio classification

The paper introduces a domain‑specific parameter‑isolation architecture for domain‑incremental learning (DIL) in audio classification, aiming to preserve knowledge from earlier domains without accessing their data. By employing data‑free generative replay and cross‑domain feature generation, the method constructs new experts conditioned on all previously frozen models, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Applied to the DCASE 2026 Challenge Task 7, the approach achieves micro and macro accuracies of 78.4 % and 78.9 %, outperforming the baseline by 33 and 25 percentage points, respectively, with ablation studies confirming the contribution of each component.

By Jongyeon Park, Do-Hyeon Lim, Sang-won Park, Hong Kook Kim, Kyungdeuk Ko, Hyeongcheol Geum, Jeong Eun Lim
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Zero-Shot Respiratory Sound Classification through LLM-Augmented Audio-Text Alignment

The paper introduces a framework that aligns self‑supervised respiratory encoders with medical terminology in a shared latent space, enabling zero‑shot respiratory sound classification. By using a medical LLM to generate structured reports from metadata, the method creates dense semantic anchors for contrastive learning, combining a sigmoid‑based contrastive loss with the encoder’s native SSL objective and similarity‑aware negative sampling. On nine tasks across six datasets, the approach achieves a 61.3% mean zero‑shot AUC, outperforming CLAP and Qwen2‑Audio, and reaches the highest linear probing AUC with only 43% of the data used by full‑scale baselines.

By Mustafa Talha \.Ilerisoy, Hung Manh Pham, Mathias Funk, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Aaqib Saeed
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

RA-QA: A Benchmarking System for Respiratory Audio Question Answering Under Real-World Heterogeneity

arXiv:2602. 18452v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As conversational multimodal AI tools are increasingly adopted to process patient data for health assessment, robust benchmarks are needed to measure progress and expose failure modes under realistic conditions.

By Gaia A. Bertolino, Yuwei Zhang, Tong Xia, Domenico Talia, Cecilia Mascolo
arXiv AI
Aug 28

From Sound to Symptom: Real-Time Respiratory Signal Understanding for Conversational Healthcare Agents

The paper introduces HealthCUES, a real‑time streaming pipeline that extracts and analyzes cough and throat‑clearing events from live spoken conversations. It detects coughs within sub‑second latency, distinguishes cough subtypes (dry, wet, barking, whooping), differentiates coughing from throat clearing, and estimates temporal boundaries, all while gating alerts based on conversational context. The system, built on Qwen3Omni, achieves high accuracy (93% F1 for cough detection) and low latency (340 ms) and has been validated by healthcare professionals for telehealth use.

By Tanmay Laud, Herprit Mahal, Subhabrata Mukherjee
arXiv AI
Jun 9

AeroSpectra Sentinel: An Auditable LLM Prompt-Chaining Decision-Support Workflow for Acute Asthma Risk Assessment from Respiratory Sounds and Clinical Signals

arXiv:2606. 08247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Acute asthma risk assessment requires rapid interpretation of respiratory sounds, oxygenation, airflow limitation, speech ability, work of breathing, mental status, and response to reliever therapy.

By Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut