# The Gait Signature of Frailty: Transfer Learning based Deep Gait Models for Scalable Frailty Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24434/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [GaitSet: Regarding Gait as a Set for Cross-View Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06186/) (2018)
- [Gait Recognition via Effective Global-Local Feature Representation and Local Temporal Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01461/) (2020)
- [Gait Recognition in the Wild with Dense 3D Representations and A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02569/) (2022)
- [Exploring Deep Models for Practical Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03301/) (2023)
- [Supervised Transfer Learning at Scale for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05913/) (2021)
- [ViT-Linearizer: Distilling Quadratic Knowledge into Linear-Time Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00037/) (2025)
- [Encoding of Demographic and Anatomical Information in Chest X-Ray-based Severe Left Ventricular Hypertrophy Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03192/) (2025)
- [GRASP-PsONet: Gradient-based Removal of Spurious Patterns for PsOriasis Severity Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21883/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Frailty is a condition in aging medicine characterized by diminished physiological reserve and increased vulnerability to stressors. However, frailty assessment remains subjective, heterogeneous, and difficult to scale in clinical practice. Gait is a sensitive marker of biological aging, capturing multisystem decline before overt disability. Yet the application of modern computer vision to gait-based frailty assessment has been limited by small, imbalanced datasets and a lack of clinically representative benchmarks. In this work, we introduce a publicly available silhouette-based frailty gait dataset collected in a clinically realistic setting, spanning the full frailty spectrum and including older adults who use walking aids. Using this dataset, we evaluate how pretrained gait recognition models can be adapted for frailty classification under limited data conditions. We study both convolutional and hybrid attention-based architectures and show that predictive performance depends primarily on how pretrained representations are transferred rather than architectural complexity alone. Across models, selectively freezing low-level gait representations while allowing higher-level features to adapt yields more stable and generalizable performance than either full fine-tuning or rigid freezing. Conservative handling of class imbalance further improves training stability, and combining complementary learning objectives enhances discrimination between clinically adjacent frailty states. Interpretability analyses reveal consistent model attention to lower-limb and pelvic regions, aligning with established biomechanical correlates of frailty. Together, these findings establish gait-based representation learning as a scalable, non-invasive, and interpretable framework for frailty assessment and support the integration of modern biometric modeling approaches into aging research and clinical practice.