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Main Authors: Zolnour, Ali, Azadmaleki, Hossein, Haghbin, Yasaman, Taherinezhad, Fatemeh, Nezhad, Mohamad Javad Momeni, Rashidi, Sina, Khani, Masoud, Taleban, AmirSajjad, Sani, Samin Mahdizadeh, Dadkhah, Maryam, Noble, James M., Bakken, Suzanne, Yaghoobzadeh, Yadollah, Vahabie, Abdol-Hossein, Rouhizadeh, Masoud, Zolnoori, Maryam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10027
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author Zolnour, Ali
Azadmaleki, Hossein
Haghbin, Yasaman
Taherinezhad, Fatemeh
Nezhad, Mohamad Javad Momeni
Rashidi, Sina
Khani, Masoud
Taleban, AmirSajjad
Sani, Samin Mahdizadeh
Dadkhah, Maryam
Noble, James M.
Bakken, Suzanne
Yaghoobzadeh, Yadollah
Vahabie, Abdol-Hossein
Rouhizadeh, Masoud
Zolnoori, Maryam
author_facet Zolnour, Ali
Azadmaleki, Hossein
Haghbin, Yasaman
Taherinezhad, Fatemeh
Nezhad, Mohamad Javad Momeni
Rashidi, Sina
Khani, Masoud
Taleban, AmirSajjad
Sani, Samin Mahdizadeh
Dadkhah, Maryam
Noble, James M.
Bakken, Suzanne
Yaghoobzadeh, Yadollah
Vahabie, Abdol-Hossein
Rouhizadeh, Masoud
Zolnoori, Maryam
contents Alzheimer's disease and related dementias(ADRD) affect nearly five million older adults in the United States, yet more than half remain undiagnosed. Speech-based natural language processing(NLP) offers a scalable approach for detecting early cognitive decline through subtle linguistic markers that may precede clinical diagnosis. This study develops and evaluates a speech-based screening pipeline integrating transformer embeddings with handcrafted linguistic features, synthetic augmentation using large language models(LLMs), and benchmarking of unimodal and multimodal classifiers. External validation assessed generalizability to a MCI-only cohort. Transcripts were drawn from the ADReSSo 2021 benchmark dataset(n=237, Pitt Corpus) and the DementiaBank Delaware corpus(n=205, MCI vs. controls). Ten transformer models were tested under three fine-tuning strategies. A late-fusion model combined embeddings from the top transformer with 110 linguistic features. Five LLMs(LLaMA8B/70B, MedAlpaca7B, Ministral8B,GPT-4o) generated label-conditioned synthetic speech for augmentation, and three multimodal LLMs(GPT-4o,Qwen-Omni,Phi-4) were evaluated in zero-shot and fine-tuned modes. On ADReSSo, the fusion model achieved F1=83.3(AUC=89.5), outperforming transformer-only and linguistic baselines. MedAlpaca7B augmentation(2x) improved F1=85.7, though larger scales reduced gains. Fine-tuning boosted unimodal LLMs(MedAlpaca7B F1=47.7=>78.7), while multimodal models performed lower (Phi-4=71.6;GPT-4o=67.6). On Delaware, the fusion plus 1x MedAlpaca7B model achieved F1=72.8(AUC=69.6). Integrating transformer and linguistic features enhances ADRD detection. LLM-based augmentation improves data efficiency but yields diminishing returns, while current multimodal models remain limited. Validation on an independent MCI cohort supports the pipeline's potential for scalable, clinically relevant early screening.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10027
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLMCARE: early detection of cognitive impairment via transformer models enhanced by LLM-generated synthetic data
Zolnour, Ali
Azadmaleki, Hossein
Haghbin, Yasaman
Taherinezhad, Fatemeh
Nezhad, Mohamad Javad Momeni
Rashidi, Sina
Khani, Masoud
Taleban, AmirSajjad
Sani, Samin Mahdizadeh
Dadkhah, Maryam
Noble, James M.
Bakken, Suzanne
Yaghoobzadeh, Yadollah
Vahabie, Abdol-Hossein
Rouhizadeh, Masoud
Zolnoori, Maryam
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias(ADRD) affect nearly five million older adults in the United States, yet more than half remain undiagnosed. Speech-based natural language processing(NLP) offers a scalable approach for detecting early cognitive decline through subtle linguistic markers that may precede clinical diagnosis. This study develops and evaluates a speech-based screening pipeline integrating transformer embeddings with handcrafted linguistic features, synthetic augmentation using large language models(LLMs), and benchmarking of unimodal and multimodal classifiers. External validation assessed generalizability to a MCI-only cohort. Transcripts were drawn from the ADReSSo 2021 benchmark dataset(n=237, Pitt Corpus) and the DementiaBank Delaware corpus(n=205, MCI vs. controls). Ten transformer models were tested under three fine-tuning strategies. A late-fusion model combined embeddings from the top transformer with 110 linguistic features. Five LLMs(LLaMA8B/70B, MedAlpaca7B, Ministral8B,GPT-4o) generated label-conditioned synthetic speech for augmentation, and three multimodal LLMs(GPT-4o,Qwen-Omni,Phi-4) were evaluated in zero-shot and fine-tuned modes. On ADReSSo, the fusion model achieved F1=83.3(AUC=89.5), outperforming transformer-only and linguistic baselines. MedAlpaca7B augmentation(2x) improved F1=85.7, though larger scales reduced gains. Fine-tuning boosted unimodal LLMs(MedAlpaca7B F1=47.7=>78.7), while multimodal models performed lower (Phi-4=71.6;GPT-4o=67.6). On Delaware, the fusion plus 1x MedAlpaca7B model achieved F1=72.8(AUC=69.6). Integrating transformer and linguistic features enhances ADRD detection. LLM-based augmentation improves data efficiency but yields diminishing returns, while current multimodal models remain limited. Validation on an independent MCI cohort supports the pipeline's potential for scalable, clinically relevant early screening.
title LLMCARE: early detection of cognitive impairment via transformer models enhanced by LLM-generated synthetic data
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10027