# Transferring speech-generic and depression-specific knowledge for Alzheimer's disease detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04624/) (2021)
- [Layer-wise Analysis of a Self-supervised Speech Representation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04734/) (2021)
- [Comparative layer-wise analysis of self-supervised speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03929/) (2022)
- [Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech: The ADReSS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06833/) (2020)
- [Detecting cognitive decline using speech only: The ADReSSo Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09356/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning for Automatic Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05777/) (2021)
- [Speech Emotion Recognition using Self-Supervised Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03896/) (2022)
- [An Exploration of Self-Supervised Pretrained Representations for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04590/) (2021)
- [Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition Using Acoustic, Lexical, Disfluency and Speech Pause Features Robust to Noisy Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15684/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Multi-Modal Features From Pre-trained Networks for Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04070/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised representations in speech-based depression detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12263/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Pretrained Representations with Task-related Keywords for Alzheimer's Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08019/) (2023)
- [Cross-lingual Alzheimer's Disease detection based on paralinguistic and pre-trained features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07650/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [CogniAlign: Word-Level Multimodal Speech Alignment with Gated Cross-Attention for Alzheimer's Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01890/) (2025)
- [VocalAgent: Large Language Models for Vocal Health Diagnostics with Safety-Aware Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13577/) (2025)
- [Deep Insights into Cognitive Decline: A Survey of Leveraging Non-Intrusive Modalities with Deep Learning Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18972/) (2024)
- [Explainable and Generalisable LLM-based Cognitive Decline Detection with Spontaneous Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34217/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) from spontaneous speech has attracted increasing attention while the sparsity of training data remains an important issue. This paper handles the issue by knowledge transfer, specifically from both speech-generic and depression-specific knowledge. The paper first studies sequential knowledge transfer from generic foundation models pretrained on large amounts of speech and text data. A block-wise analysis is performed for AD diagnosis based on the representations extracted from different intermediate blocks of different foundation models. Apart from the knowledge from speech-generic representations, this paper also proposes to simultaneously transfer the knowledge from a speech depression detection task based on the high comorbidity rates of depression and AD. A parallel knowledge transfer framework is studied that jointly learns the information shared between these two tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves AD and depression detection, and produces a state-of-the-art F1 score of 0.928 for AD diagnosis on the commonly used ADReSSo dataset.