arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

LOPA: Enhancing Spoken Language Assessment via Latent Ordinal Prototype Alignment

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2606.31310 (cs)
[Submitted on 30 Jun 2026]

Title:LOPA: Enhancing Spoken Language Assessment via Latent Ordinal Prototype Alignment

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Abstract:Fueled by increasing model scale and multimodal inputs, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for Spoken Language Assessment (SLA). While effective, this paradigm often overlooks the intrinsic ordinal structure of language acquisition. This paper works around the necessity of large-scale MLLMs by introducing Latent Ordinal Prototype Alignment (LOPA) for SLA, a prototype-based regularizer that enforces an ordinal geometric prior directly on the latent space. Coupled with Semantic-Anchored Layer Routing (SALR), which adaptively harvests multi-depth representations from a frozen Whisper encoder, our framework achieves an RMSE of 0.361. This performance rivals billion-parameter systems without the need for LLM-based fine-tuning. Further analysis reveals that SALR's synergy with LOPA offers interpretable, criterion-aligned preferences, thereby supporting an efficient and ordinal-aware modeling alternative to current scaling-centric models for SLA.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Multimedia (cs.MM)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.31310 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2606.31310v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.31310
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Hong Yun Lin [view email]
[v1] Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:19:32 UTC (789 KB)
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