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Prompt-MAML: Model-Agnostic Meta-in-Context Learning for Major Depressive Disorder Classification

Lifelo, Zita, Ding, Jianguo, Wang, Zongjie, Shi, Feifei, Ning, Huansheng and Dhelim, Sahraoui orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-3620-1395 (2026) Prompt-MAML: Model-Agnostic Meta-in-Context Learning for Major Depressive Disorder Classification. Tsinghua Science and Technology . ISSN 1878-7606

Abstract
The classification of major depressive disorders (MDDs) is a challenging task in clinical practice, especially in low-resource scenarios where generalization is essential for effective adaptation. Recent progress in meta-training large language models (LLMs) via in-context learning (ICL) offers promise for robust adaptation to unseen tasks without parameter updates. However, existing methods rely on multitask fine-tuning and do not fully exploit the optimization advantages of model-agnostic meta learning (MAML) techniques, limiting their generalization. This study proposes prompt-MAML, a novel method for meta-training LLMs that enhances multimodal ICL for classifying MDD tasks. The method integrates audio-textual features through a transformer-based cross-modal alignment module and incorporates bi-level optimization to learn generalizable model parameters that adapt well to unseen tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that prompt-MAML outperforms strong baseline models by an average improvement in macro-F1 of +4 on seen domains, +3 on unseen domains, and +3 in few-shot settings, demonstrating robustness and effectiveness in data-scarce and cross-domain clinical scenarios. Additionally, exploration depth is shown to play a key role in task performance, and further analysis of task complexity, modality, and optimiser configurations highlights critical design considerations for meta-training LLMs.
Metadata
Item Type:Article (Published)
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:large language model, multimodality, in-context learning, major depressive disorder detection, model-agnostic meta learning
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Computational linguistics
Computer Science > Machine learning
Computer Science > World Wide Web
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Publisher:Qinghua Daxue Xuebao Bianjibu
Official URL:https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/TST.2025....
Copyright Information:Authors
ID Code:32442
Deposited On:20 Mar 2026 15:18 by Sahraoui Dhelim . Last Modified 20 Mar 2026 15:18
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