Towards Paradigm-General Suicide Risk Detection via Speech LLM
About
Suicide risk among adolescents remains a critical public health concern, and speech provides a non-invasive and scalable approach for its detection. Speech-based suicide risk assessment commonly relies on carefully designed speech elicitation paradigms (\textit{e.g.,} verbal fluency, reading, or question answering) to probe cognitive and affective states. Existing approaches, however, typically focus on one single paradigm at a time. This paper, for the first time, investigates cross-paradigm approaches that unify diverse speech elicitation paradigms within a single model. Specifically, we use a speech LLM as backbone with a mixture of DoRA experts (MoDE) to capture complementary cues across assessments dynamically, tested on 1,223 participants across ten speech elicitation paradigms. Results show that MoDE outperforms both paradigm-specific and conventional joint-learning models. Moreover, it can generalise to unseen paradigms and provide better confidence calibration.