Related papers: Call for Papers -- The BabyLM Challenge: Sample-ef…

The BabyLM Challenge is a community effort to close the data-efficiency gap between human and computational language learners. Participants compete to optimize language model training on a fixed language data budget of 100 million words or…

The goal of the BabyLM is to stimulate new research connections between cognitive modeling and language model pretraining. We invite contributions in this vein to the BabyLM Workshop, which will also include the 4th iteration of the BabyLM…

Children can acquire language from less than 100 million words of input. Large language models are far less data-efficient: they typically require 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more data and still do not perform as well as humans on many…

BabyLM aims to dissolve the boundaries between cognitive modeling and language modeling. We call for both workshop papers and for researchers to join the 3rd BabyLM competition. As in previous years, we call for participants in the…

After last year's successful BabyLM Challenge, the competition will be hosted again in 2024/2025. The overarching goals of the challenge remain the same; however, some of the competition rules will be different. The big changes for this…

In this work, we explain our approach employed in the BabyLM Challenge, which uses various methods of training language models (LMs) with significantly less data compared to traditional large language models (LLMs) and are inspired by how…

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM…

We describe our team's contribution to the STRICT-SMALL track of the BabyLM Challenge. The challenge requires training a language model from scratch using only a relatively small training dataset of ten million words. We experiment with…

We present BabyBabelLM, a multilingual collection of datasets modeling the language a person observes from birth until they acquire a native language. We curate developmentally plausible pretraining data aiming to cover the equivalent of…

The use of neural language models to model human behavior has met with mixed success. While some work has found that the surprisal estimates from these models can be used to predict a wide range of human neural and behavioral responses,…

The BabyLM challenge called on participants to develop sample-efficient language models. Submissions were pretrained on a fixed English corpus, limited to the amount of words children are exposed to in development (<100m). The challenge…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, primarily due to their in-context learning ability. This ability could be applied to building babylike models, i.e.…

This paper details the work of the University of Groningen for the BabyLM Challenge. We follow the idea that, like babies, language models should be introduced to simpler concepts first and build off of that knowledge to understand more…

Research on the cognitive plausibility of language models (LMs) has so far mostly concentrated on modelling psycholinguistic response variables such as reading times, gaze durations and N400/P600 EEG signals, while mostly leaving out the…

For specialized domains, there is often not a wealth of data with which to train large machine learning models. In such limited data / compute settings, various methods exist aiming to $\textit{do more with less}$, such as finetuning from a…

This paper describes a linguistically-motivated approach to the 2024 edition of the BabyLM Challenge (Warstadt et al. 2023). Rather than pursuing a first language learning (L1) paradigm, we approach the challenge from a second language (L2)…

We present our submission to the BabyLM challenge, whose goal was to improve the sample efficiency of language models. We trained an ensemble consisting of a GPT-2 and small LLaMA models on the developmentally-plausible, 10M-word BabyLM…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are at the forefront of NLP achievements but fall short in dealing with shortcut learning, factual inconsistency, and vulnerability to adversarial inputs.These shortcomings are especially critical in medical…

We present Lil-Bevo, our submission to the BabyLM Challenge. We pretrained our masked language models with three ingredients: an initial pretraining with music data, training on shorter sequences before training on longer ones, and masking…

Language models are typically trained on large corpora of text in their default orthographic form. However, this is not the only option; representing data as streams of phonemes can offer unique advantages, from deeper insights into…