Mitigating Confounding in Speech-Based Dementia Detection through Weight Masking

Deep transformer models have been used to detect linguistic anomalies in patient transcripts for early Alzheimer's disease (AD) screening. While pre-trained neural language models (LMs) fine-tuned on AD transcripts perform well, little research has explored the effects of the gender of the speakers represented by these transcripts. This work addresses gender confounding in dementia detection and proposes two methods: the $\textit{Extended Confounding Filter}$ and the $\textit{Dual Filter}$, which isolate and ablate weights associated with gender. We evaluate these methods on dementia datasets with first-person narratives from patients with cognitive impairment and healthy controls. Our results show transformer models tend to overfit to training data distributions. Disrupting gender-related weights results in a deconfounded dementia classifier, with the trade-off of slightly reduced dementia detection performance.

@article{sheng2025_2506.05610,
  title={ Mitigating Confounding in Speech-Based Dementia Detection through Weight Masking },
  author={ Zhecheng Sheng and Xiruo Ding and Brian Hur and Changye Li and Trevor Cohen and Serguei Pakhomov },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05610},
  year={ 2025 }
}