Cross-Scale Transfer Learning for Depression Severity Prediction: From PHQ-8 to HAMD-17 Across Languages and Clinical Paradigms

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.28430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work addresses continuous depression-severity score prediction from clinical interview transcripts under data scarcity. We propose a sequential low-rank adaptation (LoRA) protocol for cross-scale transfer: a Qwen3 backbone with a bounded regression head is first fine-tuned on the English DAIC-WOZ dataset (189 avatar-mediated sessions, PHQ-8), and the adapter then initializes fine-tuning on the Chinese PDCH dataset (100 real clinical consultati