LOPA: Enhancing Spoken Language Assessment via Latent Ordinal Prototype Alignment

arXiv:2606.31310v1 Announce Type: new 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 ordi...