Liuyu Wu | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

CogPic: A Multimodal Dataset for Early Cognitive Impairment Assessment via Picture Description Tasks

The automated evaluation of cognitive status using multimedia technologies offers a promising avenue for early dementia detection. However, the development of robust machine learning models for cognitive impairment detection is frequently hindered by the scarcity of large-scale, strictly synchronized, and clinically validated multimodal datasets. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce CogPic, a comprehensive Mandarin multimodal benchmark designed for fine-grained cognitive-status assessment. CogPic comprises strictly synchronized acoustic, visual, and linguistic data collected from 574 participants across three standardized picture-description tasks. To establish reliable diagnostic reference labels, expert clinical neuropsychologists conducted comprehensive evaluations and stratified participants into Healthy Control (HC), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) groups through clinical consensus. Extensive benchmark experiments spanning handcrafted and deep learning models in unimodal and multimodal settings yield a best trimodal Macro-F1 of 58.34\%. To our knowledge, CogPic stands as the largest, most modality-rich, and most comprehensively characterized Mandarin dataset of its kind to date. Together, CogPic and its extensive baseline evaluations establish a rigorous empirical foundation for future multimedia research toward robust and clinically generalizable automated cognitive health assessment.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

Cross-Linguistic Persona-Driven Data Synthesis for Robust Multimodal Cognitive Decline Detection

Speech-based digital biomarkers represent a scalable, non-invasive frontier for the early identification of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). However, the development of robust diagnostic models remains impeded by acute clinical data scarcity and a lack of interpretable reasoning. Current solutions frequently struggle with cross-lingual generalization and fail to provide the transparent rationales essential for clinical trust. To address these barriers, we introduce SynCog, a novel framework integrating controllable zero-shot multimodal data synthesis with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) deduction fine-tuning. Specifically, SynCog simulates diverse virtual subjects with varying cognitive profiles to effectively alleviate clinical data scarcity. This generative paradigm enables the rapid, zero-shot expansion of clinical corpora across diverse languages, effectively bypassing data bottlenecks in low-resource settings and bolstering the diagnostic performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Leveraging this synthesized dataset, we fine-tune a foundational multimodal backbone using a CoT deduction strategy, empowering the model to explicitly articulate diagnostic thought processes rather than relying on black-box predictions. Extensive experiments on the ADReSS and ADReSSo benchmarks demonstrate that augmenting limited clinical data with synthetic phenotypes yields competitive diagnostic performance, achieving Macro-F1 scores of 80.67% and 78.46%, respectively, outperforming current baseline models. Furthermore, evaluation on an independent real-world Mandarin cohort (CIR-E) demonstrates robust cross-linguistic generalization, attaining a Macro-F1 of 48.71%. These findings constitute a critical step toward providing clinically trustworthy and linguistically inclusive cognitive assessment tools for global healthcare.

cs.CL↗