# RBA-FE: A Robust Brain-Inspired Audio Feature Extractor for Depression Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07118 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07118/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [Recurrent Neural Network Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.2329/) (2014)
- [Long short-term memory and learning-to-learn in networks of spiking neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09574/) (2018)
- [A Theoretically Grounded Application of Dropout in Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.05287/) (2015)
- [AVEC 2016 - Depression, Mood, and Emotion Recognition Workshop and Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01600/) (2016)
- [MODMA dataset: a Multi-modal Open Dataset for Mental-disorder Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09283/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Analysis on Adversarial Robustness of Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02704/) (2019)
- [DEPA: Self-Supervised Audio Embedding for Depression Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13028/) (2019)
- [SpeechFormer++: A Hierarchical Efficient Framework for Paralinguistic Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14638/) (2023)
- [Prediction of Depression Severity Based on the Prosodic and Semantic Features with Bidirectional LSTM and Time Distributed CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12456/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty Estimation for Heatmap-based Landmark Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02351/) (2022)
- [FrAUG: A Frame Rate Based Data Augmentation Method for Depression Detection from Speech Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05912/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article proposes a robust brain-inspired audio feature extractor (RBA-FE) model for depression diagnosis, using an improved hierarchical network architecture. Most deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art performance for image-based diagnostic tasks, ignoring the counterpart audio features. In order to tailor the noise challenge, RBA-FE leverages six acoustic features extracted from the raw audio, capturing both spatial characteristics and temporal dependencies. This hybrid attribute helps alleviate the precision limitation in audio feature extraction within other learning models like deep residual shrinkage networks. To deal with the noise issues, our model incorporates an improved spiking neuron model, called adaptive rate smooth leaky integrate-and-fire (ARSLIF). The ARSLIF model emulates the mechanism of ``retuning of cellular signal selectivity" in the brain attention systems, which enhances the model robustness against environmental noises in audio data. Experimental results demonstrate that RBA-FE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the MODMA dataset, respectively with 0.8750, 0.8974, 0.8750 and 0.8750 in precision, accuracy, recall and F1 score. Extensive experiments on the AVEC2014 and DAIC-WOZ datasets both show enhancements in noise robustness. It is further indicated by comparison that the ARSLIF neuron model suggest the abnormal firing pattern within the feature extraction on depressive audio data, offering brain-inspired interpretability.