arXiv Computation and Language

NarraSpace: Multimodal Scene-Grounded Evidence for Picture-Description Dementia Classification

NarraSpace is a multimodal framework that links words and speech times to specific picture elements in picture‑description dementia classification tasks. It retrieves utterances for predefined scene events, summarizes coverage and temporal organization, and uses a frozen language model to contrast event text between Alzheimer’s disease and healthy controls, incorporating transcript surprisal and coverage metrics. On the Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech benchmark, a support vector classifier built on these features achieves about 81% accuracy and 91% AUC, while the system preserves source records that map event scores back to utterances, speech intervals, and lexical matches.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

DementiaCare-Bench: A Modality-Validated Video Benchmark

DementiaCare-Bench is a new video benchmark designed to evaluate video-language models (VLMs) on understanding behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). It contains 56 caregiver training videos, 94 clips across nine BPSD categories, and 2023 questions that are grounded in transcript spans and labeled by their visual demand. The benchmark reveals that most VLMs perform well on questions answerable by language alone but struggle with those requiring ordered frames, and a lightweight LoRA fine‑tune (DemCare‑VLM) can improve video dependence.

By Afrouz Sheikholeslami, Yuankai Qi, Xuyun Zhang, Luping Zhou, Amin Beheshti, Quan Z. Sheng, Ming-Hsuan Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

MemoCare: An Interactive Multimodal Mobile System for Automated Cognitive Screening

arXiv:2610.10448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: MemoCare is an interactive mobile system for automated multimodal cognitive screening. A React Native application combines spoken responses, temporal...

By Duy-Cat Can, Mau Minh Phuc Le, Tuan-Khoa Hoang, Hai-Dang Nguyen, Trung-Hieu Do, Dang Minh Ly, Minh-Duc Nguyen, Nghia TT Hoang, Linh-Trung Nguyen, Huy-Hieu Pham, Huong Ha, Binh T. Nguyen, Oliver Y. Ch\'en
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Task-Centric Multimodal Learning for Cognitive Impairment Detection

The paper introduces a contactless, multimodal screening framework that uses video, audio, and text data collected during structured voice interactions with Amazon Alexa to detect mild cognitive impairment (MCI). It evaluates three conversational tasks—spontaneous speech, comprehension, and recall—to determine which provides the most informative signals, compares unimodal models, and assesses multimodal fusion. Results show that while individual modalities perform best on specific tasks, the multimodal model consistently achieves higher accuracy (up to 0.76) across tasks, indicating that integrated behavioral cues can reliably distinguish MCI from healthy aging.

By Sankalp Vaish, Rishank Singh, Sumukh Veeramalla, Caroline Summerour, John A. Batsis, Xiaohui Liang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Acoustic Biomarkers for Alzheimer's Disease Detection from Spontaneous Speech

The study explores acoustic biomarkers derived from spontaneous speech to differentiate Alzheimer's disease patients from healthy controls. Using a structured picture‑description task, low‑level prosodic, spectral, and temporal features were extracted and fed into various machine learning classifiers. The best models achieved clinically meaningful separation between diagnostic groups, indicating that non‑invasive audio screening could aid early detection of dementia.

By Anh L Tran, Arjee Javellana Restar, Bereket Kindo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Why Alzheimer's Speech Screening Fails to Generalize: Bridging the Deployment Gap via Cross-Corpus Evidence Anchoring

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.

By Zijian Lu, Sizhe Liu, Yin Zhang, Jixuan Deng, Xinrong Lin, Xinchen Yuan, Chicheng Jin, Yiping Zuo, Yuanchao Li