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Automated Detection and Classification of Delusion-related Content in Naturalistic Audio Diaries Using Multi-Agent Language Models

arXiv:2605.24755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech monologues recorded in naturalistic settings provide opportunities to characterize mental illness phenomenology and detect symptom exacerbation. Large language models (LLMs) offer new possibilities for automating this process, as they require annotated data primarily for evaluation rather than training. In this paper, we present a novel automated, multi-agent LLM pipeline for the fine-grained, multi-label extraction of language suggestive of delusional beliefs, associated affective responses, and behavioral responses from transcripts of naturalistic audio diaries collected from people with moderate persecutory ideation. Evaluating an ensemble of three foundation models, we demonstrate that detailed diagnostic prompt instructions successfully reduce false positives for delusional theme classification, but also constrain the interpretation of affective or behavioral responses. Furthermore, comparing multi-agent adjudication frameworks shows that complex conversational debate between agents diminishes accuracy on clinically ambiguous text by inducing premature consensus. Instead, majority voting establishes robust performance (Micro F1 of 0.872 and 0.779 for delusion detection and classification respectively). This work provides a validated and scalable pipeline for the automated detection and characterization of content suggesting delusional beliefs in naturalistic speech.

Disentangled Double Machine Learning for Accurate Causal Effect Estimation

arXiv:2605.24808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Confounding bias is a key challenge in causal effect estimation from observational data. Double Machine Learning (DML) addresses this issue by estimating treatment and outcome nuisance functions, constructing treatment and outcome residuals, and estimating causal effects from the residuals. However, DML often produces biased and unstable estimates in highdimensional or finite-sample scenarios. One reason is that DML estimates nuisance functions using all covariates without disentangling distinct latent factors, resulting in unreliable nuisance function estimation. Another is that imprecise nuisance estimation further introduces residual dependence between the treatment residual and the remaining outcome error, undermining the accuracy of causal effect estimates. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose Disentangled Double Machine Learning (DDML), a novel algorithm that integrates two key strategies. First, a causal role disentanglement strategy decomposes covariates into confounders, treatment-specific factors, and outcomespecific factors for enabling reliable nuisance function estimation. And second, a residual dependence orthogonalization strategy mitigates residual dependence caused by nuisance estimation errors for enhancing the precision of causal effect estimates. Experimental results on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world datasets demonstrate that DDML significantly outperforms 13 state-of-the-art baseline algorithms in both MAE and RMSE.
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