# Mitigating Data Imbalance in Automated Speaking Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03010/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [Attention-Based Models for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.07503/) (2015)
- [Balancing Logit Variation for Long-tailed Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02061/) (2023)
- [Proficiency assessment of L2 spoken English using wav2vec 2.0](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13168/) (2022)
- [An Effective Automated Speaking Assessment Approach to Mitigating Data Scarcity and Imbalanced Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07575/) (2024)
- [L2 proficiency assessment using self-supervised speech representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08849/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated Speaking Assessment (ASA) plays a crucial role in evaluating second-language (L2) learners proficiency. However, ASA models often suffer from class imbalance, leading to biased predictions. To address this, we introduce a novel objective for training ASA models, dubbed the Balancing Logit Variation (BLV) loss, which perturbs model predictions to improve feature representation for minority classes without modifying the dataset. Evaluations on the ICNALE benchmark dataset show that integrating the BLV loss into a celebrated text-based (BERT) model significantly enhances classification accuracy and fairness, making automated speech evaluation more robust for diverse learners.