Cleaner Speech, Weaker Generalization: Revisiting Pitt-Derived Benchmarks for Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Read the original on Hugging Face Trending Papers →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Trending Papers.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Trending Papers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.