arXiv AI

MERID: Multimodal Exploration via Recursive Self-Improvement Agents for Major Depression Analysis

MERID is a framework that uses recursive self‑improvement agents to autonomously develop multimodal pipelines for detecting major depressive disorder. It aligns multimodal records with depression targets, jointly modifies representations, fusion, and predictors, and guides revisions through evidence‑guided evolution to validate improvements before inheritance. Experiments on depression benchmarks show MERID outperforms existing multimodal and agent‑based baselines, especially highlighting the importance of acoustic and linguistic cues.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 21

Explainable Multimodal Depression Recognition in Clinical Interviews via PHQ-Aligned Symptom Summarization

arXiv:2501. 16106v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal depression recognition for clinical interviews (MDRC) have demonstrated the potential of AI systems by integrating textual, acoustic, and facial cues.

By Wenjie Zheng, Qiming Xie, Jianfei Yu, Yang Wang, Lei Cao, Fei Wang, Shijin Wang, Rui Xia, Chengqing Zong
arXiv AI
Jul 29

DynaBridge: Dynamic Summary-Guided Cross-Task Multimodal Fusion for DASS-Structured Mental Health Assessment

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 Computation and Language
Aug 28

BALMS: Benchmarking Agentic LLMs for Longitudinal Mental Health Sensing

BALMS is a benchmark for evaluating large language model (LLM) agents that analyze longitudinal wearable data to predict mental‑health wellbeing scores and generate evidence‑grounded rationales. It covers three real‑world datasets, two task families (score prediction and rationale generation), and tests five LLM backbones across open‑ and closed‑source paradigms. The study finds that zero‑shot agents rarely beat a simple mean baseline, and while chain‑of‑thought prompting helps reasoning, it does not ensure temporal grounding or numerical accuracy.

By Yu Yvonne Wu, Arvind Pillai, Yuliang Chen, Yuwei Zhang, Sudarshan Regmi, Tess Z. Griffin, Michael V. Heinz, Lisa A. Marsch, Nicholas C. Jacobson, Andrew Campbell
arXiv AI
Sep 4

LongCounsel-8: A Benchmark Suite for Longitudinal Depression Tracking from Multi-Session Counseling Dialogues

LongCounsel-8 is a new benchmark suite comprising three datasets with 7,749 five‑session counseling dialogues, each grounded in real client profiles, depression trajectories, symptom compositions, and counseling patterns. The benchmark addresses challenges of longitudinal consistency, empirical grounding of symptom progression, and natural expression of controlled depression states without exposing labels. Experiments show that lower single‑session error does not ensure accurate trend detection, methods perform worse on worsening trajectories, and adding more session history can reduce trend prediction accuracy.

By Jiayi Li, Zhaomin Wu, Bingsheng He
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

LongCounsel-8: A Benchmark Suite for Longitudinal Depression Tracking from Multi-Session Counseling Dialogues

LongCounsel-8 is a benchmark suite comprising three independently generated datasets with 7,749 five‑session counseling trajectories, designed to evaluate longitudinal depression tracking. The datasets are grounded in real‑world client profiles, depression trajectories, symptom compositions, and counseling patterns, and they address challenges of longitudinal consistency, empirical grounding, and natural expression of controlled depression states. Experiments show that lower single‑session error does not guarantee accurate trend identification, that methods perform worse on worsening trajectories, and that adding more session history can reduce trend prediction accuracy.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Towards Interpretable Depression Detection: Linking Acoustic Features to DSM-5 Indicators

The paper proposes a transparent framework that links speech acoustic features—such as pitch variability, pauses, and speech tempo—to DSM‑5 indicators of depression, offering interpretable, indicator‑level outputs instead of opaque black‑box models. It runs locally on commodity hardware to preserve privacy and has been preliminarily evaluated on the DAIC‑WOZ dataset, showing consistent associations between acoustic cues and DSM‑5 indicators of psychomotor change and concentration difficulty. Future work aims to validate the approach on longitudinal data and expand multimodal integration while keeping edge constraints.

By Jonas L\"anzlinger, Katharina O. E. M\"uller, Burkhard Stiller, Bruno Rodrigues
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Interpretable Symptom Vectors for Depression in a Large Language Model

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