The study examines how speech preprocessing—such as enhancement, sample selection, and demographic balancing—affects Alzheimer’s disease detection models that use the Pitt Corpus. Experiments reveal that while speech‑enhanced datasets boost in‑domain accuracy, they diminish cross‑dataset robustness and introduce class imbalance and prediction shifts, even when training and testing enhancements are matched. Large audio‑language models show similar sensitivity, indicating that cleaner speech does not guarantee better real‑world performance.
Speech-based Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection increasingly relies on speech-enhanced and curated versions of the Pitt Corpus, where speech enhancement, sample selection, and demographic balancing ar...
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: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.
The study investigates whether acoustic factors encoded in pretrained self‑supervised learning (SSL) models can systematically influence predictions in speech‑based Alzheimer's disease (AD) assessment. Using the ADReSSo dataset and three large SSL backbones, the authors applied controlled noise and reverberation interventions to various audio segments and combined layer‑wise decoding, input‑ and representation‑space interventions, and geometric alignment analysis. The results demonstrate that such acoustic interventions alter AD predictions across all models, with noise producing the strongest effect, and that these effects are structured relative to the classifier’s decision direction and reproducible on a held‑out test set.
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.
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.
arXiv:2608. 07378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for enabling timely interventions that may slow disease progression and improve patient outcomes.
The development of multilingual Alzheimer's Disease Dementia (AD) detection models presents significant challenges due to the resource-intensive and time-consuming nature of language-specific model training. We propose a novel solution using cross-language training to detect AD in languages beyond those used for model training.
The paper adapts Reinforce Adjoint Matching (RAM) to generative speech enhancement, allowing a pretrained model to be post‑trained on real recordings using weak supervision such as text transcripts. RAM shifts the model’s conditional distribution toward higher‑reward outputs by generating enhanced speech on‑policy, evaluating each output with a potentially non‑differentiable reward, and analytically re‑noising the endpoint to create inputs for a reward‑guided regression objective. Experiments on real CHiME‑4 recordings show a 5.08‑percentage‑point reduction in word error rate compared to the pretrained FlowSE model, while maintaining all reported non‑intrusive speech quality metrics and receiving no significant preference in a subjective listening test.
arXiv:2603. 15988v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech quality assessment (DSQA) is critical for clinical diagnostics and inclusive speech technologies.
arXiv:2606. 17339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems.
The paper addresses the challenge of within-class variation in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) detection, where individuals with the same diagnosis can show differing levels of cognitive impairment. It introduces two methods—Soft Target Distillation (SoTD) and Instance-level Re-balancing (InRe)—that estimate sample-specific AD probabilities to better capture this heterogeneity. Experiments on the ADReSS and CU-MARVEL datasets demonstrate that these scores correlate with independent cognitive assessments and enhance AD detection performance.