Snugi-AI-v2 @ eRisk 2026 Task 2: Early Depression Detection via a Learned Stopping Policy with Sustained Confidence Gate

Abstract

We describe the Snugi-AI-v2 submission to eRisk 2026 Task 2, the second edition of contextualized early depression detection from Reddit discussions. Our central contribution is a learned MLP stopping policy trained to directly optimize ERDE50, replacing the fixed and tiered threshold strategies used in all prior eRisk Task 2 submissions. Combined with a sustained confidence gate that commits only after N=3 consecutive rounds of high policy confidence, the system reduces false positives caused by transient emotional posts without sacrificing recall. The pipeline encodes each discussion thread with a frozen MentalRoBERTa model, maps the accumulated representation to a depression probability via an MLP classifier, and delegates the timing decision to the learned policy. Our best run achieves F1 = 0.73 (Run 1) and F_latency = 0.70 (Runs 0 and 3), with a median alert round of 8 out of 500, completing the full evaluation in 1 hour 26 minutes, the fastest among all complete-submission teams. We report a systematic ablation across five runs spanning two encoder variants, four stopping strategies, and three gate values, along with negative results from GRPO policy training, BDI-II post filtering, MentalLongformer encoding, and DeBERTa ensembling. Code: https://github.com/chiuyuwen91/erisk-2026