English

Resp-Agent: An Agent-Based System for Multimodal Respiratory Sound Generation and Disease Diagnosis

Audio and Speech Processing 2026-03-02 v3 Artificial Intelligence Databases Human-Computer Interaction Multiagent Systems Sound

Abstract

Deep learning-based respiratory auscultation is currently hindered by two fundamental challenges: (i) inherent information loss, as converting signals into spectrograms discards transient acoustic events and clinical context; (ii) limited data availability, exacerbated by severe class imbalance. To bridge these gaps, we present Resp-Agent, an autonomous multimodal system orchestrated by a novel Active Adversarial Curriculum Agent (Thinker-A2^2CA). Unlike static pipelines, Thinker-A2^2CA serves as a central controller that actively identifies diagnostic weaknesses and schedules targeted synthesis in a closed loop. To address the representation gap, we introduce a modality-weaving Diagnoser that weaves clinical text with audio tokens via strategic global attention and sparse audio anchors, capturing both long-range clinical context and millisecond-level transients. To address the data gap, we design a flow matching Generator that adapts a text-only Large Language Model (LLM) via modality injection, decoupling pathological content from acoustic style to synthesize hard-to-diagnose samples. As a foundation for this work, we introduce Resp-229k, a benchmark corpus of 229k recordings paired with LLM-distilled clinical narratives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Resp-Agent consistently outperforms prior approaches across diverse evaluation settings, improving diagnostic robustness under data scarcity and long-tailed class imbalance. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zpforlove/Resp-Agent.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.15909,
  title  = {Resp-Agent: An Agent-Based System for Multimodal Respiratory Sound Generation and Disease Diagnosis},
  author = {Pengfei Zhang and Tianxin Xie and Minghao Yang and Li Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15909},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages, 3 figures. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2026