Why Pre-trained Models Fail: Feature Entanglement in Multi-modal Depression Detection

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Xiangyu, Ahmed, Beena, Epps, Julien
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Xiangyu
Ahmed, Beena
Epps, Julien
author_facet Zhang, Xiangyu
Ahmed, Beena
Epps, Julien
contents Depression remains a pressing global mental health issue, driving considerable research into AI-driven detection approaches. While pre-trained models, particularly speech self-supervised models (SSL Models), have been applied to depression detection, they show unexpectedly poor performance without extensive data augmentation. Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their success across various domains, have not been explored in multi-modal depression detection. In this paper, we first establish an LLM-based system to investigate its potential in this task, uncovering fundamental limitations in handling multi-modal information. Through systematic analysis, we discover that the poor performance of pre-trained models stems from the conflation of high-level information, where high-level features derived from both content and speech are mixed within pre-trained models model representations, making it challenging to establish effective decision boundaries. To address this, we propose an information separation framework that disentangles these features, significantly improving the performance of both SSL models and LLMs in depression detection. Our experiments validate this finding and demonstrate that the integration of separated features yields substantial improvements over existing approaches, providing new insights for developing more effective multi-modal depression detection systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06620
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why Pre-trained Models Fail: Feature Entanglement in Multi-modal Depression Detection
Zhang, Xiangyu
Ahmed, Beena
Epps, Julien
Audio and Speech Processing
Depression remains a pressing global mental health issue, driving considerable research into AI-driven detection approaches. While pre-trained models, particularly speech self-supervised models (SSL Models), have been applied to depression detection, they show unexpectedly poor performance without extensive data augmentation. Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their success across various domains, have not been explored in multi-modal depression detection. In this paper, we first establish an LLM-based system to investigate its potential in this task, uncovering fundamental limitations in handling multi-modal information. Through systematic analysis, we discover that the poor performance of pre-trained models stems from the conflation of high-level information, where high-level features derived from both content and speech are mixed within pre-trained models model representations, making it challenging to establish effective decision boundaries. To address this, we propose an information separation framework that disentangles these features, significantly improving the performance of both SSL models and LLMs in depression detection. Our experiments validate this finding and demonstrate that the integration of separated features yields substantial improvements over existing approaches, providing new insights for developing more effective multi-modal depression detection systems.
title Why Pre-trained Models Fail: Feature Entanglement in Multi-modal Depression Detection
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06620