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arXiv · 2404.06214

[Call for Papers] The 2nd BabyLM Challenge: Sample-efficient pretraining on a developmentally plausible corpus

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

After last year's successful BabyLM Challenge, the competition will be hosted again in 2024/2025. The overarching goals of the challenge remain the same; however, some of the competition rules will be different. The big changes for this year's competition are as follows: First, we replace the loose track with a paper track, which allows (for example) non-model-based submissions, novel cognitively-inspired benchmarks, or analysis techniques. Second, we are relaxing the rules around pretraining data, and will now allow participants to construct their own datasets provided they stay within the 100M-word or 10M-word budget. Third, we introduce a multimodal vision-and-language track, and will release a corpus of 50% text-only and 50% image-text multimodal data as a starting point for LM model training. The purpose of this CfP is to provide rules for this year's challenge, explain these rule changes and their rationale in greater detail, give a timeline of this year's competition, and provide answers to frequently asked questions from last year's challenge.

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Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell, Michael Y. Hu, Tal Linzen, Aaron Mueller, Candace Ross, Alex Warstadt, Ethan Wilcox, Adina Williams, Chengxu Zhuang. 2024-07-27. [Call for Papers] The 2nd BabyLM Challenge: Sample-efficient pretraining on a developmentally plausible corpus. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06214

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