Decision-Level Ordinal Modeling for Multimodal Essay Scoring with Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Zhang, Han, Su, Jiamin, liu, Li
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917345613578240
author Zhang, Han
Su, Jiamin
liu, Li
author_facet Zhang, Han
Su, Jiamin
liu, Li
contents Automated essay scoring (AES) predicts multiple rubric-defined trait scores for each essay, where each trait follows an ordered discrete rating scale. Most LLM-based AES methods cast scoring as autoregressive token generation and obtain the final score via decoding and parsing, making the decision implicit. This formulation is particularly sensitive in multimodal AES, where the usefulness of visual inputs varies across essays and traits. To address these limitations, we propose Decision-Level Ordinal Modeling (DLOM), which makes scoring an explicit ordinal decision by reusing the language model head to extract score-wise logits on predefined score tokens, enabling direct optimization and analysis in the score space. For multimodal AES, DLOM-GF introduces a gated fusion module that adaptively combines textual and multimodal score logits. For text-only AES, DLOM-DA adds a distance-aware regularization term to better reflect ordinal distances. Experiments on the multimodal EssayJudge dataset show that DLOM improves over a generation-based SFT baseline across scoring traits, and DLOM-GF yields further gains when modality relevance is heterogeneous. On the text-only ASAP/ASAP++ benchmarks, DLOM remains effective without visual inputs, and DLOM-DA further improves performance and outperforms strong representative baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14891
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decision-Level Ordinal Modeling for Multimodal Essay Scoring with Large Language Models
Zhang, Han
Su, Jiamin
liu, Li
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Automated essay scoring (AES) predicts multiple rubric-defined trait scores for each essay, where each trait follows an ordered discrete rating scale. Most LLM-based AES methods cast scoring as autoregressive token generation and obtain the final score via decoding and parsing, making the decision implicit. This formulation is particularly sensitive in multimodal AES, where the usefulness of visual inputs varies across essays and traits. To address these limitations, we propose Decision-Level Ordinal Modeling (DLOM), which makes scoring an explicit ordinal decision by reusing the language model head to extract score-wise logits on predefined score tokens, enabling direct optimization and analysis in the score space. For multimodal AES, DLOM-GF introduces a gated fusion module that adaptively combines textual and multimodal score logits. For text-only AES, DLOM-DA adds a distance-aware regularization term to better reflect ordinal distances. Experiments on the multimodal EssayJudge dataset show that DLOM improves over a generation-based SFT baseline across scoring traits, and DLOM-GF yields further gains when modality relevance is heterogeneous. On the text-only ASAP/ASAP++ benchmarks, DLOM remains effective without visual inputs, and DLOM-DA further improves performance and outperforms strong representative baselines.
title Decision-Level Ordinal Modeling for Multimodal Essay Scoring with Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14891