Related papers: BAMBI: Developing Baby Language Models for Italian

Children from bilingual backgrounds benefit from interactions with parents and teachers to re-acquire their heritage language. In this paper, we investigate how this insight from behavioral study can be incorporated into the learning of…

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…

Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…

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…

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…

Multilingualism is incredibly common around the world, leading to many important theoretical and practical questions about how children learn multiple languages at once. For example, does multilingual acquisition lead to delays in learning?…

Self-supervised techniques for learning speech representations have been shown to develop linguistic competence from exposure to speech without the need for human labels. In order to fully realize the potential of these approaches and…

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…

State-of-the-art vision-and-language models consist of many parameters and learn from enormous datasets, surpassing the amounts of linguistic data that children are exposed to as they acquire a language. This paper presents our approach to…

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…

The number of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasing steadily, though the majority are designed predominantly for the English language. While state-of-the-art LLMs can handle other languages, due to language contamination or…

We present ToddlerBERTa, a BabyBERTa-like language model, exploring its capabilities through five different models with varied hyperparameters. Evaluating on BLiMP, SuperGLUE, MSGS, and a Supplement benchmark from the BabyLM challenge, we…

Human infants rapidly develop visual reasoning skills from minimal input, suggesting that developmentally inspired pretraining could significantly enhance the efficiency of vision-language models (VLMs). Although recent efforts have…

While Italian is a high-resource language, there are few Italian-native benchmarks to evaluate generative Large Language Models (LLMs) in this language. This work presents three new benchmarks: Invalsi MATE to evaluate models performance on…

Most Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to date are trained predominantly on English data, which makes them struggle to understand non-English input and fail to generate output in the desired target language. Existing efforts mitigate…

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.…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieved rapid progress in the recent years. However, despite their growth, VLMs development is heavily grounded on English, leading to two main limitations: (i) the lack of multilingual and multimodal datasets…

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 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,…

Children acquire language grounding with remarkable robustness from limited visuo-linguistic input in ways that surpass today's best large multimodal models. Recent research suggests current vision-language models (VLMs) trained on curated…