WPG-MoE: Weak-Prior-Guided Dense Mixture-of-Experts for User-Level Social Media Depression Detection
Abstract
Online social media posts provide scalable signals for early depression screening, and recent studies mainly improve pre-classification evidence through risk-post selection, symptom grounding, and clinically informed feature construction. However, these screening-stage designs often leave final decisions to a single detector, overlooking how users heterogeneously express depressive risk after screening. A monolithic classifier must average across heterogeneous users, which may dilute localized evidence and cause misclassification, especially for non-self-disclosing users. To address this issue, we propose WPG-MoE, a weak-prior-guided dense mixture-of-experts framework built on a shared large language model (LLM) backbone. WPG-MoE derives user-level weak semantic priors to softly route users to experts matched to different evidence layouts. We formulate this process as learning using privileged information (LUPI): rich LLM-extracted structured evidence guides training-time routing, while inference retains only Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) template screening and the deployable backbone. Experiments on Chinese and English datasets show that WPG-MoE outperforms strong baselines with interpretable routing behavior.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.04350,
title = {WPG-MoE: Weak-Prior-Guided Dense Mixture-of-Experts for User-Level Social Media Depression Detection},
author = {Xian Li and Yuanhe Tian and Yang Yang and Guoqing Wang and Yan Song},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.04350},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
23 pages, 8 figures, 26 tables