mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Multimodal LLMs are not all you need for Pediatric Speech Language Pathology

arXiv 2604.26568 ↗First posted 29 Apr 2026cs.CLcited by 0

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) affect roughly five percent of children, yet speech-language pathologists face severe staffing shortages and unmanageable caseloads. We test a hierarchical approach to SSD classification on the granular multi-task SLPHelmUltraSuitePlus benchmark. We propose a cascading approach from binary classification to type, and symptom classification. By fine-tuning Speech Representation Models (SRM), and using targeted data augmentation we mitigate biases found by previous works, and improve upon all clinical tasks in the benchmark. We also treat Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with our data augmentation approach. Our results demonstrate that SRM consistently outperform the LLM-based state-of-the-art across all evaluated tasks by a large margin. We publish our models and code to foster future research.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 12 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2026.

Builds on

12 of 27 references.

References · 12

  1. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
  2. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  3. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 4,057
  4. 2020wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representationscited by 3,905
  5. 2021HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Unitscited by 2,342
  6. 2021WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processingcited by 1,657
  7. 2025Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAscited by 521
  8. 2019UltraSuite: A Repository of Ultrasound and Acoustic Data from Child Speech Therapy Sessionscited by 16
  9. 2022Automatic Detection of Speech Sound Disorder in Child Speech Using Posterior-based Speaker Representationscited by 3
  10. 2024Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for the Diagnosis of pronunciation of Speech Sound Disorders in Korean childrencited by 3
  11. 2025The Sound of Syntax: Finetuning and Comprehensive Evaluation of Language Models for Speech Pathologycited by 2
  12. 2025Best Practices and Considerations for Child Speech Corpus Collection and Curation in Educational, Clinical, and Forensic Scenarioscited by 1

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Pediatric Speech-Language Pathology vignettes: A Proof-of-Concept Study
  2. 2025K-Function: Joint Pronunciation Transcription and Feedback for Evaluating Kids Language Function
  3. 2025VocalBench-DF: A Benchmark for Evaluating Speech LLM Robustness to Disfluency
  4. 2025Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models for CLP Speech Classification ↗
  5. 2026Toward Generalizable Cognitive Impairment Detection with Speech-Based Multimodal Large Language Models
  6. 2025MedVoiceBias: A Controlled Study of Audio LLM Behavior in Clinical Decision-Making
  7. 2024RespLLM: Unifying Audio and Text with Multimodal LLMs for Generalized Respiratory Health Prediction
  8. 2025PediatricsMQA: a Multi-modal Pediatrics Question Answering Benchmark