MINORIA RESEARCH

MINORIA’s approach balances technical efficiency with clinical rigor, enabling SLMs to augment—not replace—mental health professionals while addressing resource disparities in PTSD care.

Data Curation

Diverse Trauma Narratives

  • Create synthetic dialogues covering PTSD symptoms (e.g., flashbacks, avoidance) and cultural contexts using LLM-generated personas 2.
  • Example: TIDE dataset’s 500 personas with varied trauma histories (combat, assault, disasters) and demographics 2.

Clinical Validation

  • Psychologists review scenarios for emotional plausibility and trauma sensitivity (e.g., avoiding retraumatizing language) 3.
  • Annotate linguistic markers of PTSD (disfluencies, avoidance semantics) from clinical interview transcripts 3.

Model Architecture Selection

Teacher-Student Framework

  • Use large models (e.g., Claude Sonnet 3.5) to generate empathetic responses via Diverse Response Inpainting, creating training data for SLMs 1.
  • Optimize for compact architectures (0.5B–5B parameters) to enable on-device processing and reduce latency 2.

Domain-Specific Embeddings

  • Fine-tune embeddings on trauma narratives (e.g., LLaMA embeddings + neural networks achieve 0.700 F1 in PTSD detection) 3.

Training & Fine-Tuning

Empathy-Centric Objectives

Train models to excel in three empathy factors:

  1. Emotion recognition: Identify distress cues (e.g., “I can’t sleep because of the nightmares”) 2.
  2. Distress normalization: Validate experiences without pathologizing (e.g., “Your reaction makes sense given what happened”) 2.
  3. Supportive reflection: Suggest clinically aligned strategies (e.g., grounding techniques) 1.
  4. Bias Mitigation : Implement debiasing protocols using adversarial training to reduce misdiagnosis risks in minority populations 3.

Validation & Evaluation

Clinical Metrics

  • Assess against DSM-5 criteria using tools like the DAIC-WOZ dataset (domain-specific models achieve 0.754 AUC) 3.
  • Human evaluations rate responses on empathy, safety, and cultural relevance (e.g., 29% referral increase in minority trials) 2.

Demographic Sensitivity Testing

Test performance across age, education, and trauma type subgroups (e.g., older adults prioritize distress validation) 2.

Deployment & Monitoring

Ethical Guardrails

  • Implement transparent decision logs for clinician review and verify treatment recommendations 2.
  • Use federated learning to update models without compromising patient privacy 2.

Continuous Learning

Incorporate clinician feedback loops to refine responses (e.g., adaptive learning from therapist corrections) 3.

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