Related papers: BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developme…

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?…

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…

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…

This paper presents BAMBI (BAby language Models Boostrapped for Italian), a series of Baby Language Models (BabyLMs) trained on data that mimic the linguistic input received by a five-year-old Italian-speaking child. The BAMBI models are…

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…

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…

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…

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 present the call for papers for the BabyLM Challenge: Sample-efficient pretraining on a developmentally plausible corpus. This shared task is intended for participants with an interest in small scale language modeling, human language…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable ability to comprehend, reason, and generate following nature language instructions. However, the development of LLMs has been primarily focused on high-resource languages, such as English,…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

High-resource languages such as English, enables the pretraining of high-quality large language models (LLMs). The same can not be said for most other languages as LLMs still underperform for non-English languages, likely due to a gap in…

Language models provide a key framework for studying linguistic theories based on prediction, but phonological analysis using large language models (LLMs) is difficult; there are few phonological benchmarks beyond English and the standard…

Dataset curation has become a basis for strong large language model (LLM) performance. While various rule-based filtering heuristics exist for English and multilingual datasets, model-based filtering techniques have primarily focused on…

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)…

The impact of different multilingual data mixtures in pretraining large language models (LLMs) has been a topic of ongoing debate, often raising concerns about potential trade-offs between language coverage and model performance (i.e., the…