On Large Foundation Models and Alzheimer’s Disease Detection
Chuyuan Li, Giuseppe Carenini, Thalia Shoshana Field · 2025
Large Foundation Models such as Llama and LLaVA have displayed incredible capabilities in a wide range of domains and tasks.However, it is unclear whether these models match specialist capabilities without special training or fine-tuning.In this paper, we investigate the innate ability of foundation models as neurodegenerative disease specialists, particularly for detecting the Alzheimer's Disease.Precisely, we use a language model, Llama-3.1, and a visual language model, Llama3-LLaVA-NeXT, to detect language specificity between Alzheimer's Disease patients and healthy controls through a well-known Picture Description task.Results show that Llama is comparable to supervised classifiers, while LLaVA, despite its additional "vision", lags behind.