Mitigating Confounding in Speech-Based Dementia Detection through Weight Masking

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05610v1
• Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:45:59 GMT
• Title: Mitigating Confounding in Speech-Based Dementia Detection through Weight Masking
• Authors: Zhecheng Sheng, Xiruo Ding, Brian Hur, Changye Li, Trevor Cohen, Serguei Pakhomov,
• Abstract summary: This work addresses gender confounding in dementia detection.<n>It proposes two methods: the $textitExtended Confounding Filter$ and the $textitDual Filter$, which isolate and ablate weights associated with gender.<n>We evaluate these methods on dementia datasets with first-person narratives from patients with cognitive impairment and healthy controls.
• Score: 7.542209006633763
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Deep transformer models have been used to detect linguistic anomalies in patient transcripts for early Alzheimer's disease (AD) screening. While pre-trained neural language models (LMs) fine-tuned on AD transcripts perform well, little research has explored the effects of the gender of the speakers represented by these transcripts. This work addresses gender confounding in dementia detection and proposes two methods: the $\textit{Extended Confounding Filter}$ and the $\textit{Dual Filter}$, which isolate and ablate weights associated with gender. We evaluate these methods on dementia datasets with first-person narratives from patients with cognitive impairment and healthy controls. Our results show transformer models tend to overfit to training data distributions. Disrupting gender-related weights results in a deconfounded dementia classifier, with the trade-off of slightly reduced dementia detection performance.

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