MINT: Multimodal Imaging-to-Speech Knowledge Transfer for Early Alzheimer's Screening

arXiv:2602.23994 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV · Submitted 2026-02-27 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV

Submitted: 2026-02-27

Updated: 2026-09-16

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder in which mild cognitive impairment (MCI) precedes dementia.

Terminology

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder in which mild cognitive impairment (MCI) precedes dementia. Structural MRI provides biomarkers but requires costly infrastructure, limiting population-scale deployment. Speech offers a non-invasive alternative, yet speech-only classifiers are developed independently of neuroimaging and lack biological grounding for CN-versus-MCI classification. We propose MINT (Multimodal Imaging-to-Speech Knowledge Transfer), a three-stage framework that transfers MRI-derived biomarker structure to speech during training. An MRI teacher defines a compact embedding space for CN-versus-MCI classification, while a residual projection head aligns speech representations to this space using a combined geometric loss. The frozen MRI classifier enables imaging-free inference. On ADNI-4, aligned speech achieves performance comparable to speech baselines, while multimodal fusion improves over MRI alone. Ablations identify dropout regularization and self-supervised pretraining as important design choices. To our knowledge, MINT is the first demonstration of MRI-to-speech knowledge transfer for early Alzheimer's screening without imaging at inference.

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