MLlm-DR: Towards Explainable Depression Recognition with MultiModal Large Language Models

Publication date: Jul 07, 2025

Automated depression diagnosis aims to analyze multimodal information from interview videos to predict participants’ depression scores. Previous studies often lack clear explanations of how these scores were determined, limiting their adoption in clinical practice. While the advent of LLMs provides a possible pathway for explainable depression diagnosis, current LLMs capable of processing multimodal data lack training on interview data, resulting in poor diagnostic performance when used directly. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal large language model (MLlm-DR) that can understand multimodal information inputs and supports explainable depression diagnosis. MLlm-DR integrates a smaller LLMs and a lightweight query module (LQ-former). Specifically, the smaller LLMs is designed to generate depression scores and corresponding evaluation rationales. To enhance its logical reasoning for domain-specific tasks while maintaining practicality, we constructed a robust training dataset to fine-tune it. Meanwhile, the LQ-former captures depression-related features from speech and visual data, aiding the model’s ability to process multimodal information, to achieve comprehensive depression diagnosis. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on two interview-based benchmark datasets, CMDC and E-DAIC-WOZ, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority.

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