Multi-Level Privacy-Preserving Dementia Detection from Speech via Targeted Adversarial Obfuscation and Representation Learning

Henriette Flore Kenne; Raphael Anaadumba; Mohammad Arif Ul Alam

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arXiv · 2607.17098

Multi-Level Privacy-Preserving Dementia Detection from Speech via Targeted Adversarial Obfuscation and Representation Learning

Henriette Flore Kenne·Raphael Anaadumba·Mohammad Arif Ul Alam

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Abstract

Speech recordings used for dementia detection inherently expose speaker identity, raising critical privacy concerns. Existing methods typically address only singular threats and fail to resolve the privacy--utility trade-off. We propose a multi-level framework designed to neutralize two distinct eavesdropping vectors. At the signal level, a Cumulative Signal Attack (CSA) concentrates perturbations in keyword-aligned regions to maximize transcription error (Word Error Rate WER = 1.00) while preserving vital prosodic biomarkers. At the feature level, a Gradient Reversal Layer (GRL) with Mutual Information (MI)-guided noise injection suppresses speaker-discriminative dimensions while retaining dementia-relevant diagnostic structure. Evaluated on the DementiaBank Pitt Corpus, our framework achieves near-chance speaker identification (Equal Error Rate EER = 0.59, F1 = 0.003) while maintaining strong dementia classification performance (F1 = 0.78, AUC = 0.86).

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Henriette Flore Kenne, Raphael Anaadumba, Mohammad Arif Ul Alam. 2026-07-19. Multi-Level Privacy-Preserving Dementia Detection from Speech via Targeted Adversarial Obfuscation and Representation Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17098

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