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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wu, Fan, Wang, Tsai-Ning, Zumarraga, Nicolas, Wang, Ning, Kreft, Markus, O'Sullivan, Kevin, Fleisch, Elgar, Aalami, Oliver, Schmiedmayer, Paul, Jakob, Robert, Langer, Patrick
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13362
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Table of Contents:
  • Auscultation is a vital diagnostic tool, yet its utility is often limited by subjective interpretation. While general-purpose Audio-Language Models (ALMs) excel in general domains, they struggle with the nuances of physiological signals. We propose a framework that aligns multi-site auscultation recordings directly with a frozen Large Language Model (LLM) embedding space via gated cross-attention. By leveraging the LLM's latent world knowledge, our approach moves beyond isolated classification toward holistic, patient-level assessment. On the CaReSound benchmark, our model achieves a state-of-the-art 0.865 F1-macro and 0.952 BERTScore. We demonstrate that lightweight, domain-specific encoders rival large-scale ALMs and that multi-site aggregation provides spatial redundancy that mitigates temporal truncation. This alignment of medical acoustics with text foundations offers a scalable path for bridging signal processing and clinical assessment.