# Recognizing Dementia from Neuropsychological Tests with State Space Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10311/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01743/) (2025)
- [Powerset multi-class cross entropy loss for neural speaker diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13025/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Mamba in Speech: Towards an Alternative to Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12609/) (2024)
- [SSAMBA: Self-Supervised Audio Representation Learning with Mamba State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11831/) (2024)
- [Audio Mamba: Bidirectional State Space Model for Audio Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03344/) (2024)
- [Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition Using Acoustic, Lexical, Disfluency and Speech Pause Features Robust to Noisy Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15684/) (2021)
- [Speech Slytherin: Examining the Performance and Efficiency of Mamba for Speech Separation, Recognition, and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09732/) (2024)
- [Comparing Acoustic-based Approaches for Alzheimer's Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01555/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Pretrained Representations with Task-related Keywords for Alzheimer's Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08019/) (2023)
- [Audio Mamba: Pretrained Audio State Space Model For Audio Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13636/) (2024)
- [DASS: Distilled Audio State Space Models Are Stronger and More Duration-Scalable Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04082/) (2024)
- [Spoken Language Biomarkers for Detecting Cognitive Impairment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07551/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Early detection of dementia is critical for timely medical intervention and improved patient outcomes. Neuropsychological tests are widely used for cognitive assessment but have traditionally relied on manual scoring. Automatic dementia classification (ADC) systems aim to infer cognitive decline directly from speech recordings of such tests. We propose Demenba, a novel ADC framework based on state space models, which scale linearly in memory and computation with sequence length. Trained on over 1,000 hours of cognitive assessments administered to Framingham Heart Study participants, some of whom were diagnosed with dementia through adjudicated review, our method outperforms prior approaches in fine-grained dementia classification by 21%, while using fewer parameters. We further analyze its scaling behavior and demonstrate that our model gains additional improvement when fused with large language models, paving the way for more transparent and scalable dementia assessment tools. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Demenba-0861