James Glass

Saurabhchand Bhati, Yuan Gong, Leonid Karlinsky et al.

Large Audio Language Models (LALM) combine the audio perception models and the Large Language Models (LLM) and show a remarkable ability to reason about the input audio, infer the meaning, and understand the intent. However, these systems rely on Transformers which scale quadratically with the input sequence lengths which poses computational challenges in deploying these systems in memory and time-constrained scenarios. Recently, the state-space models (SSMs) have emerged as an alternative to transformer networks. While there have been successful attempts to replace transformer-based audio perception models with state-space ones, state-space-based LALMs remain unexplored. First, we begin by replacing the transformer-based audio perception module and then replace the transformer-based LLM and propose the first state-space-based LALM. Experimental results demonstrate that space-based LALM despite having a significantly lower number of parameters performs competitively with transformer-based LALMs on close-ended tasks on a variety of datasets.

Liming Wang, Saurabhchand Bhati, Cody Karjadi et al.

Early detection of dementia is critical for timely medical intervention and improved patient outcomes. Neuropsychological tests are widely used for cognitive assessment but have traditionally relied on manual scoring. Automatic dementia classification (ADC) systems aim to infer cognitive decline directly from speech recordings of such tests. We propose Demenba, a novel ADC framework based on state space models, which scale linearly in memory and computation with sequence length. Trained on over 1,000 hours of cognitive assessments administered to Framingham Heart Study participants, some of whom were diagnosed with dementia through adjudicated review, our method outperforms prior approaches in fine-grained dementia classification by 21\%, while using fewer parameters. We further analyze its scaling behavior and demonstrate that our model gains additional improvement when fused with large language models, paving the way for more transparent and scalable dementia assessment tools. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Demenba-0861