One of the primary challenges faced by researchers and clinicians seeking to study mental health is that direct observation of indicators of mental health issues can be challenging, as a diagnosis often relies on either self-reporting of specific feelings or actions, or direct observation of a subject (which can be difficult due to time and cost considerations). That is why there has been a specific focus over the past two decades on deploying technology to help human clinicians identify and assess mental health issues. Between 2000 and 2019, 54 academic papers focused on the development of machine learning systems to help diagnose and address mental health issues were published, according to a 2020 article published in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Of the 54 papers, 40 focused on the development of a machine learning (ML) model based on specific data as their main research contribution, while seven were proposals of specific concepts, data methods, models, or systems, and three applied existing ML algorithms to better understand and assess mental health, or improve the communication of mental health providers. A few of the papers described the conduct of empirical studies of an end-to-end ML system or assessed the quality of ML predictions, while one paper specifically discusses design implications for user-centric, deployable ML systems.

AI can detect signals that are informative about mental health from questionnaires and brain scans. A study published today by an interdisciplinary collaboration, directed by Denis Engemann from Inria, demonstrates that machine learning from large population cohorts can yield "proxy measures" for brain-related health issues without the need for a specialist's assessment. The researchers took advantage of the UK Biobank, one of the world's largest and most comprehensive biomedical databases, that contains detailed and secure health-related data on the UK population. This work is published in the open access journal GigaScience. Mental health issues have been increasing worldwide, with the WHO determining that there has been a 13% increase in mental health conditions and substance abuse disorders between 2007 and 2017.

Figure 1 – Figure supplement 1: Learning curves on the random split-half validation used for model building. To facilitate comparisons, we evaluated predictions of age, fluid intelligence and neuroticism from a complete set of socio-demographic variables without brain imaging using the coefficient of determination R2 metric (y-axis) to compare results obtained from 100 to 3000 training samples (x-axis). The cross-validation (CV) distribution was obtained from 100 Monte Carlo splits. Across targets, performance started to plateau after around 1000 training samples with scores virtually identical to the final model used in subsequent analyses. These benchmarks suggest that inclusion of additional training samples would not have led to substantial improvements in performance.

Oxford Winter Intelligence - Abstract: In this paper we will address an important issue of reward function integrity in artificially intelligent systems. Throughout the paper, we will analyze historical examples of wireheading in man and machine and evaluate a number of approaches proposed for dealing with reward-function corruption. While simplistic optimizers driven to maximize a proxy measure for a particular goal will always be a subject to corruption, sufficiently rational self-improving machines are believed by many to be safe from wireheading problems. Claims are often made that such machines will know that their true goals are different from the proxy measures, utilized to represent the progress towards goal achievement in their fitness functions, and will choose not to modify their reward functions in a way which does not improve chances for the true goal achievement. Likewise, supposedly such advanced machines will choose to avoid corrupting other system components such as input sensors, memory, internal and external communication channels, CPU architecture and software modules.