Understanding Cross Task Generalization in Handwriting-Based Alzheimer's Screening via Vision Language Adaptation

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Autori principali: Gong, Changqing, Qin, Huafeng, El-Yacoubi, Mounim A.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gong, Changqing
Qin, Huafeng
El-Yacoubi, Mounim A.
author_facet Gong, Changqing
Qin, Huafeng
El-Yacoubi, Mounim A.
contents Alzheimer's disease is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder for which early detection is critical. Handwriting-often disrupted in prodromal AD-provides a non-invasive and cost-effective window into subtle motor and cognitive decline. Existing handwriting-based AD studies, mostly relying on online trajectories and hand-crafted features, have not systematically examined how task type influences diagnostic performance and cross-task generalization. Meanwhile, large-scale vision language models have demonstrated remarkable zero or few-shot anomaly detection in natural images and strong adaptability across medical modalities such as chest X-ray and brain MRI. However, handwriting-based disease detection remains largely unexplored within this paradigm. To close this gap, we introduce a lightweight Cross-Layer Fusion Adapter framework that repurposes CLIP for handwriting-based AD screening. CLFA implants multi-level fusion adapters within the visual encoder to progressively align representations toward handwriting-specific medical cues, enabling prompt-free and efficient zero-shot inference. Using this framework, we systematically investigate cross-task generalization-training on a specific handwriting task and evaluating on unseen ones-to reveal which task types and writing patterns most effectively discriminate AD. Extensive analyses further highlight characteristic stroke patterns and task-level factors that contribute to early AD identification, offering both diagnostic insights and a benchmark for handwriting-based cognitive assessment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_05841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Cross Task Generalization in Handwriting-Based Alzheimer's Screening via Vision Language Adaptation
Gong, Changqing
Qin, Huafeng
El-Yacoubi, Mounim A.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Alzheimer's disease is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder for which early detection is critical. Handwriting-often disrupted in prodromal AD-provides a non-invasive and cost-effective window into subtle motor and cognitive decline. Existing handwriting-based AD studies, mostly relying on online trajectories and hand-crafted features, have not systematically examined how task type influences diagnostic performance and cross-task generalization. Meanwhile, large-scale vision language models have demonstrated remarkable zero or few-shot anomaly detection in natural images and strong adaptability across medical modalities such as chest X-ray and brain MRI. However, handwriting-based disease detection remains largely unexplored within this paradigm. To close this gap, we introduce a lightweight Cross-Layer Fusion Adapter framework that repurposes CLIP for handwriting-based AD screening. CLFA implants multi-level fusion adapters within the visual encoder to progressively align representations toward handwriting-specific medical cues, enabling prompt-free and efficient zero-shot inference. Using this framework, we systematically investigate cross-task generalization-training on a specific handwriting task and evaluating on unseen ones-to reveal which task types and writing patterns most effectively discriminate AD. Extensive analyses further highlight characteristic stroke patterns and task-level factors that contribute to early AD identification, offering both diagnostic insights and a benchmark for handwriting-based cognitive assessment.
title Understanding Cross Task Generalization in Handwriting-Based Alzheimer's Screening via Vision Language Adaptation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05841