Title: Quantifying depressive mental states with large language models
Primary area: applications to neuroscience & cognitive science
Keywords: llm, depression, mental health, sparse autoencoders

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) may have an important role to play in mental health by facilitating the quantification of verbal expressions used to communicate emotions, feelings and thoughts. While there has been substantial and very promising work in this area, the fundamental limits are uncertain. Here, focusing on depressive symptoms, we outline and evaluate LLM performance on three critical tests. The first test evaluates LLM performance on a novel ground-truth dataset from a large human sample (n=770). This dataset is novel as it contains both standard clinically validated quantifications of depression symptoms and specific verbal descriptions of the thoughts related to each symptom by the same individual. The performance of LLMs on this richly informative data shows an upper bound on the performance in this domain, and allow us to examine the extent to which inference about symptoms generalises. Second, we test to what extent the latent structure in LLMs can capture the clinically observed patterns. We train supervised sparse auto-encoders (sSAE) to predict specific symptoms and symptom patterns within a syndrome. We find that sSAE weights can effectively modify the clinical pattern produced by the model, and thereby capture the latent structure of relevant clinical variation. Third, if LLMs correctly capture and quantify relevant mental states, then these states should respond to changes in emotional states induced by validated emotion induction interventions. We show that this holds in a third experiment with 190 participants. Overall, this work provides foundational insights into the quantification of pathological mental states with LLMs, highlighting hard limits on the requirements of the data underlying LLM-based quantification; but also suggesting LLMs show substantial conceptual alignment.

TL;DR: We demonstrate and validate an approach towards quantifying human depressive mental states from language with LLMs.