StutterFuse: Mitigating Modality Collapse in Stuttering Detection with Jaccard-Weighted Metric Learning and Gated Fusion

Abstract

Stuttering detection breaks down when disfluencies overlap. Existing parametric models struggle to distinguish complex, simultaneous disfluencies (e.g., a 'block' with a 'prolongation') due to the scarcity of these specific combinations in training data. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has revolutionized NLP by grounding models in external knowledge, this paradigm remains unexplored in pathological speech processing. To bridge this gap, we introduce StutterFuse, the first Retrieval-Augmented Classifier (RAC) for multi-label stuttering detection. By conditioning a Conformer encoder on a non-parametric memory bank of clinical examples, we allow the model to classify by reference rather than memorization. We further identify and solve "Modality Collapse", an "Echo Chamber" effect where naive retrieval boosts recall but degrades precision. We mitigate this using: (1) SetCon, a Jaccard-Weighted Metric Learning objective that optimizes for multi-label set similarity, and (2) a Gated Mixture-of-Experts fusion strategy that dynamically arbitrates between acoustic evidence and retrieved context. On the SEP-28k dataset, StutterFuse achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.65, outperforming strong baselines and demonstrating remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization.