# MuFFIN: Multifaceted Pronunciation Feedback Model with Interactive Hierarchical Neural Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04956 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04956/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [Branchformer: Parallel MLP-Attention Architectures to Capture Local and Global Context for Speech Recognition and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02971/) (2022)
- [speechocean762: An Open-Source Non-native English Speech Corpus For Pronunciation Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01378/) (2021)
- [Transformer-Based Multi-Aspect Multi-Granularity Non-Native English Speaker Pronunciation Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03432/) (2022)
- [Automatic Pronunciation Assessment using Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03863/) (2022)
- [Context-aware Goodness of Pronunciation for Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08647/) (2020)
- [Balancing Logit Variation for Long-tailed Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02061/) (2023)
- [3M: An Effective Multi-view, Multi-granularity, and Multi-aspect Modeling Approach to English Pronunciation Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09110/) (2022)
- [Proficiency assessment of L2 spoken English using wav2vec 2.0](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13168/) (2022)
- [A Full Text-Dependent End to End Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis with Easy Data Augmentation Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08428/) (2021)
- [An End-to-End Mispronunciation Detection System for L2 English Speech Leveraging Novel Anti-Phone Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11950/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Pronunciation Assessment with Multi-Aspect Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08102/) (2022)
- [A Hierarchical Context-aware Modeling Approach for Multi-aspect and Multi-granular Pronunciation Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18146/) (2023)
- [Speaker-Conditioned Hierarchical Modeling for Automated Speech Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00928/) (2021)
- [Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training -- Speech synthesis is almost all you need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00774/) (2022)
- [Addressing Cold Start Problem for End-to-end Automatic Speech Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14310/) (2023)
- [Preserving Phonemic Distinctions for Ordinal Regression: A Novel Loss Function for Automatic Pronunciation Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01839/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) manages to facilitate second-language (L2) learners to practice pronunciation skills by offering timely and instructive feedback. To examine pronunciation proficiency from multiple facets, existing methods for CAPT broadly fall into two categories: mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) as well as automatic pronunciation assessment (APA). The former aims to pinpoint phonetic pronunciation errors and provide diagnostic feedback, while the latter seeks instead to quantify pronunciation proficiency pertaining to various aspects. Despite the natural complementarity between MDD and APA, researchers and practitioners, however, often treat them as independent tasks with disparate modeling paradigms. In light of this, we in this paper first introduce MuFFIN, a Multi-Faceted pronunciation Feedback model with an Interactive hierarchical Neural architecture, to jointly address the tasks of MDD and APA. To better capture the nuanced distinctions between phonemes in the feature space, a novel phoneme-contrastive ordinal regularization mechanism is then put forward to optimize the proposed model to generate more phoneme-discriminative features while factoring in the ordinality of the aspect scores. In addition, to address the intricate data imbalance problem in MDD, we design a simple yet effective training objective, which is specifically tailored to perturb the outputs of a phoneme classifier with the phoneme-specific variations, so as to better render the distribution of predicted phonemes meanwhile considering their mispronunciation characteristics. A series of experiments conducted on the Speechocean762 benchmark dataset demonstrates the efficacy of our method in relation to several cutting-edge baselines, showing state-of-the-art performance on both the APA and MDD tasks.