# From Sparse Representations to Behavioral Insights for Multimodal Depression Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11787/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [Qwen2-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10759/) (2024)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [What do we need to build explainable AI systems for the medical domain?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09923/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal depression assessment offers a promising approach to analyzing behavioral patterns associated with depression. However, existing methods often rely on dense and opaque multimodal representations, making it difficult to interpret the behavioral patterns underlying their predictions. In this work, we introduce BehavDep, a sparse factor-based framework that decomposes multimodal behavioral representations into sparse latent factors and associates them with behaviorally meaningful concepts through a semantic bridge. To address the mismatch between user-level annotations and heterogeneous video-level behaviors, BehavDep further learns video-level depression tendency scores under weak supervision and aggregates information across multiple observations for user-level assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BehavDep achieves the best overall assessment performance while revealing complementary modality contributions, heterogeneous behavioral patterns across observations, and prediction responses to concept-level editing. These results show that BehavDep provides a structured and interpretable approach to analyzing multimodal behavioral representations for depression assessment.