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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…

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…

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…

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…

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?…

A fundamental characteristic of natural language is the high rate at which speakers produce novel expressions. Because of this novelty, a heavy-tail of rare events accounts for a significant amount of the total probability mass of…

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in zero-shot recognition but their performance varies greatly across different visual concepts. For example, although CLIP achieves impressive accuracy on ImageNet (60-80%), its performance drops below…

The automatic verbalization of structured knowledge is a key task for making knowledge graphs accessible to non-expert users and supporting retrieval-augmented generation systems. Although recent advances in Data-to-Text generation have…

As language models scale, their performance improves dramatically across a wide range of tasks, but so does their tendency to memorize and regurgitate parts of their training data verbatim. This tradeoff poses serious legal, ethical, and…

Existing approaches to few-shot learning in NLP rely on large language models (LLMs) and/or fine-tuning of these to generalise on out-of-distribution data. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot learning approach based on soft-label…

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…

Supervised classification for tabular data remains a core machine learning task, yet its reliance on large labeled datasets limits applicability in data-scarce domains. For such few-shot scenarios, specialized methods like TabPFN - a…

We study the application of large language models to zero-shot and few-shot classification of tabular data. We prompt the large language model with a serialization of the tabular data to a natural-language string, together with a short…

Phrase break prediction is a crucial task for improving the prosody naturalness of a text-to-speech (TTS) system. However, most proposed phrase break prediction models are monolingual, trained exclusively on a large amount of labeled data.…

We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores…

Recent advancement in large language models (LLMs) has offered a strong potential for natural language systems to process informal language. A representative form of informal language is slang, used commonly in daily conversations and…

This paper introduces the ColorSwap dataset, designed to assess and improve the proficiency of multimodal models in matching objects with their colors. The dataset is comprised of 2,000 unique image-caption pairs, grouped into 1,000…

While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of the data they receive, and how do these…

Zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer enables a multilingual pretrained language model, finetuned on a task in one language, make predictions for this task in other languages. While being broadly studied for natural language…

As unlabeled data carry rich task-relevant information, they are proven useful for few-shot learning of language model. The question is how to effectively make use of such data. In this work, we revisit the self-training technique for…