Delta-KNN: Improving Demonstration Selection in In-Context Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that leads to dementia, and early intervention can greatly benefit from analyzing linguistic abnormalities.In this work, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as health assistants for AD diagnosis from patient-generated text using in-context learning (ICL), where tasks are defined through a few input-output examples.Empirical results reveal that conventional ICL methods, such as similarity-based selection, perform poorly for AD diagnosis, likely due to the inherent complexity of this task.To address this, we introduce Delta-KNN, a novel demonstration selection strategy that enhances ICL performance.Our method leverages a delta score to assess the relative gains of each training example, coupled with a KNN-based retriever that dynamically selects optimal "representatives" for a given input.Experiments on two AD detection datasets across three opensource LLMs demonstrate that Delta-KNN consistently outperforms existing ICL baselines.Notably, when using the Llama-3.1 model, our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results, surpassing even supervised classifiers. 1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".