Findings of the Second BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora

Michael Y. Hu, Aaron Mueller, Candace Ross, Adina Williams, Tal Linzen, Chengxu Zhuang, Ryan Cotterell, Leshem Choshen, Alex Warstadt, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox


Abstract
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 less. This year, we released improved text corpora, as well as a vision-and-language corpus to facilitate research into cognitively plausible vision language models. Submissions were compared on evaluation tasks targeting grammatical ability, (visual) question answering, pragmatic abilities, and grounding, among other abilities. Participants could submit to a 10M-word text-only track, a 100M-word text-only track, and/or a 100M-word and image multimodal track. From 31 submissions employing diverse methods, a hybrid causal-masked language model architecture outperformed other approaches. No submissions outperformed the baselines in the multimodal track. In follow-up analyses, we found a strong relationship between training FLOPs and average performance across tasks, and that the best-performing submissions proposed changes to the training data, training objective, and model architecture. This year’s BabyLM Challenge shows that there is still significant room for innovation in this setting, in particular for image-text modeling, but community-driven research can yield actionable insights about effective strategies for small-scale language modeling.
Anthology ID:
2024.conll-babylm.1
Volume:
The 2nd BabyLM Challenge at the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, FL, USA
Editors:
Michael Y. Hu, Aaron Mueller, Candace Ross, Adina Williams, Tal Linzen, Chengxu Zhuang, Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell, Alex Warstadt, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
Venues:
CoNLL | BabyLM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.conll-babylm.1/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Y. Hu, Aaron Mueller, Candace Ross, Adina Williams, Tal Linzen, Chengxu Zhuang, Ryan Cotterell, Leshem Choshen, Alex Warstadt, and Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox. 2024. Findings of the Second BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora. In The 2nd BabyLM Challenge at the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 1–21, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Findings of the Second BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora (Hu et al., CoNLL-BabyLM 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.conll-babylm.1.pdf