cs.CLSep 30, 2026

Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media with Multi-Task QLoRA

Authors: Xuan Zhong Feng, Geoffrey Martin, Hexin Dong, Yifan Peng

Organizations: Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA · Systems Engineering, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

Abstract

Explainable suicide-risk assessment requires models not only to estimate risk severity, but also to identify supporting language and the risk and protective factors expressed in a post. We present our system for the IEEE BigData 2026 Cup on Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media, which addresses three tasks: risk-level classification, evidence phrase extraction, and multi-label factor identification. Our approach adapts Qwen2.5-Instruct models using quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) and an answer-masked causal language-model objective. We jointly train across all three tasks for risk classification, jointly train on Tasks1a and 1b for evidence extraction, and adapt Task2 separately for factor identification. We also tailor aggregation to each output: we average risk-level probabilities from the 32B and 72B models, combine evidence phrases through cross-fold consensus, and calibrate factor-specific decisions through rate matching based on out-of-fold operating points. On the official leaderboard, the final system achieved a composite score of 0.7738, with 0.8089 on Task1 and 0.6919 on Task2. Across the evaluated configurations, three-task training performed best for Task1a, joint training on Tasks1a and 1b performed best for Task1b, and task-specific training performed best for Task2. Probability averaging further improved Task~1a when component models had complementary errors. These findings highlight the value of tailoring both training objectives and aggregation strategies to the output structure of each task within a unified language-model framework.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Bag of Tricks or Bag of Myths? Reducing Modeling Complexity with Task Knowledge in Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment

    Sep 7, 2026Shlok Shelat, Shrey Salvi, Souvik Roy +2Suicide RiskRisk Stratification

  2. SuiChat-CN: Benchmarking Contextual Suicide Risk Assessment in Chinese Group Chats

    May 27, 2026Xiangyu Wang, Zhiwei Yu, Chengze Du +3Suicide RiskSocial Media Posts

  3. Assessing Suicide Risk in Arabic Crisis Helpline Calls: A Comparison of Arabic and English Large Language Models

    Aug 31, 2026Linhai Ma, Rita El Hachem, Mahatab El Hajj +2Suicide RiskArabic