arXiv AI By Luqi Sun, Shreeram Suresh Chandra, Lin Zhang, You-Jin Li, Brian MacWhinney, Yu Tsao, Emily Mower Provost, Berrak Sisman

Cleaner Speech, Weaker Generalization: Revisiting Pitt-Derived Benchmarks for Alzheimer's Disease Detection

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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.

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