DepFormer: A Unified Framework with Bimodal Collaborative Transformer for Depression Detection

摘要

Depression is an increasingly prevalent mental health issue worldwide, especially among the elderly, where effective early detection is crucial for timely intervention. While recent multimodal approaches demonstrate promise in leveraging visual and auditory cues for automatic depression recognition, existing methods often fail to extract fine-grained, depression-specific patterns from pre-extracted features and underutilize cross-modal interactions. To address these challenges, we propose DepFormer, a unified framework that incorporates a Bimodal Collaborative Transformer(BCT) for cross-modal representation learning and a personalized fusion module to enhance individual-specific modeling. The architecture comprises: (1) unimodal feature extraction, (2) bimodal collaborative representation learning via the BCT, (3) personalized feature fusion, and (4) final depression classification. Critically, the BCT employs symmetric bidirectional branches comprising an Audio-to-Video Transformer and a Video-to-Audio Transformer to enable mutual enhancement and complementary learning across modalities. Extensive experiments validate DepFormer's effectiveness, securing first place in the MPDD Challenge 2025 (Elderly Track), underscoring its strong practical potential.