Related papers: On the robustness of modeling grounded word learni…

We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007).…

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating linguistically coherent text, sparking discussions about their relevance to understanding human language learnability. However, a significant gap exists between…

Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…

Typically, children start to learn their first words between 6 and 9 months, linking spoken utterances to their visual referents. Without prior knowledge, a word encountered for the first time can be interpreted in countless ways; it might…

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…

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…

Young children develop sophisticated internal models of the world based on their visual experience. Can such models be learned from a child's visual experience without strong inductive biases? To investigate this, we train state-of-the-art…

In contrast to children, language models (LMs) exhibit considerably inferior data efficiency when acquiring language. In this submission to the BabyLM Challenge (Warstadt et al., 2023), we test the hypothesis that this data efficiency gap…

Infants gradually learn to parse continuous speech into words and connect names with objects, yet the mechanisms behind development of early word perception skills remain unknown. We studied the extent to which early words can be acquired…

Human infants have the remarkable ability to learn the associations between object names and visual objects from inherently ambiguous experiences. Researchers in cognitive science and developmental psychology have built formal models that…

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…

Neural network-based systems can now learn to locate the referents of words and phrases in images, answer questions about visual scenes, and execute symbolic instructions as first-person actors in partially-observable worlds. To achieve…

Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…

Predicting the words that a child is going to learn next can be useful for boosting language acquisition, and such predictions have been shown to be possible with both neural network techniques (looking at changes in the vocabulary state…

How do children learn correspondences between the language and the world from noisy, ambiguous, naturalistic input? One hypothesis is via cross-situational learning: tracking words and their possible referents across multiple situations…

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…

This study investigated whether multimodal large language models can achieve human-like sensory grounding by examining their ability to capture perceptual strength ratings across sensory modalities. We explored how model characteristics…

A few million words suffice for children to acquire language. Yet, the brain mechanisms underlying this unique ability remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we investigate neural activity recorded from over 7,400 electrodes…

Children learn powerful internal models of the world around them from a few years of egocentric visual experience. Can such internal models be learned from a child's visual experience with highly generic learning algorithms or do they…

Modern neural language models (LMs) are powerful tools for modeling human sentence production and comprehension, and their internal representations are remarkably well-aligned with representations of language in the human brain. But to…