# M2LG-DG: A Multi-modal Local-Global Domain Generalization Framework for Cross-site Major Depressive Disorder Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09186 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09186/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
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- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [VLMo: Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training with Mixture-of-Modality-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02358/) (2021)
- [Causality-inspired Single-source Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12525/) (2021)
- [Vita-CLIP: Video and text adaptive CLIP via Multimodal Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03307/) (2023)
- [Invariant Information Bottleneck for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06333/) (2021)
- [Batch-Instance Normalization for Adaptively Style-Invariant Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07925/) (2018)
- [Align and Attend: Multimodal Summarization with Dual Contrastive Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07284/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Graph Neural Networks for Connectome-Based Brain Disorder Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00813/) (2022)
- [Advances in Multimodal Adaptation and Generalization: From Traditional Approaches to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18592/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Consistency for Single Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13737/) (2022)
- [Towards Multimodal Open-Set Domain Generalization and Adaptation through Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01518/) (2024)
- [Contrastive learning for regression in multi-site brain age prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08326/) (2022)
- [MM-GTUNets: Unified Multi-Modal Graph Deep Learning for Brain Disorders Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14455/) (2024)
- [Joint semi-supervised and contrastive learning enables domain generalization and multi-domain segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05336/) (2024)
- [Augmentation-based Unsupervised Cross-Domain Functional MRI Adaptation for Major Depressive Disorder Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00085/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Classification models based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) often show lower performance at imaging sites not included during model development, which can limit their use in clinical settings. Domain generalization (DG) addresses this issue by learning representations from source sites that remain effective for unseen target sites. However, existing DG approaches for psychiatric disorder classification commonly rely on a single imaging modality and may not fully account for site-specific acquisition effects on the learned representation space. Subjects scanned at the same site share scanner hardware, acquisition settings, and preprocessing characteristics, which can cause representations to reflect acquisition conditions rather than diagnostic information. In this work, we present M2LG-DG, a source-only multimodal local-global framework for cross-site major depressive disorder (MDD) classification. The framework employs a dual-stream rs-fMRI encoder, where the global pathway models inter-regional dependencies through self-attention and the local pathway performs graph-constrained aggregation over functional connectivity-derived brain graphs. Imaging and non-imaging representations are decomposed into shared and private components and integrated through bidirectional cross-attention with a learned modality gate. A cross-site supervised contrastive objective forms positive pairs from same-class subjects acquired at different source sites, encouraging the fused representation to preserve diagnostic information across acquisition domains. On four held-out REST-meta-MDD sites, M2LG-DG achieves an AUC of 69.48% and exceeds the closest comparison method by 2.18 percentage points. Experiments on the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) dataset further support its applicability to other psychiatric neuroimaging classification tasks.