Dementia Language Models: a generalizable and controllable representation of cognitive impairment
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We introduce Dementia Language Models (DeLMs) – generalizable and controllable representations of cognitive impairment through language – alongside an evaluation framework for establishing their validity and clinical grounding. DeLMs created by fine-tuning large language models on a small clinical corpus successfully generated patient-like narratives across unseen tasks, received predicted Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores in the impaired range, and produced narratives that neurologists identified with accuracy comparable to real transcripts. The models’ internal representations, as well as their non-linguistic decision-making, supported mild cognitive impairment detection in unseen cohorts. The effect was controllable: moving from Healthy toward Dementia in weight space progressively worsened language and predicted MMSE scores while increasing dementia probability. DeLMs could support clinician training, hypothesis generation, and scalable experimentation, reserving patient involvement for where it is truly needed.
Institutions: Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Cambridge, Hadassah Medical Center, University College London, University of Pittsburgh, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Sheba Medical Center, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214179351