babylm-2026-strict-small-dialogue-heavy
BabyLM Challenge 2026 — Strict-Small track (≤10M words). Part of
*Reweighting Child-Directed and Conversational Data for Sample-Efficient
BabyLM Pretraining* (strict_small_dialogue_heavy).
- Architecture: GPT-2-style decoder-only transformer, from-scratch init
(no pretrained weights): 6 layers, 512 hidden, 8 heads,
512-token context, 27.4M parameters (tied embeddings).
- Objective: causal language modeling.
- Tokenizer: byte-level BPE, 16k vocab, trained only on this run's
≤10M-word training mixture.
- Training data: 9,999,167 words (custom mixture resampled from the official 100M Strict pool). Word counts use
whitespace tokenization matching the official BabyLM 2026 dataset cards.
Manifest and datasheet in the GitHub repo.
- Training: 10 epochs (~100M words exposure), packed
512-token sequences, effective batch 128, lr 5e-4 cosine (3% warmup),
weight decay 0.1, bf16, seed 42, single A100-80GB.
Intermediate checkpoints
As required by BabyLM 2026, checkpoints at every 1M words seen (to 10M) and
every 10M (to 100M) are available as revisions chck_1M … chck_100M:
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("qyxu1994/babylm-2026-strict-small-dialogue-heavy", revision="chck_5M")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("qyxu1994/babylm-2026-strict-small-dialogue-heavy")
Evaluation
Evaluated with the official babylm-eval
pipeline (zero-shot: BLiMP, BLiMP-supplement, EWoK, entity tracking, COMPS,
reading; fine-tuning: BoolQ, MNLI, MRPC, MultiRC, QQP, RTE, WSC):
./eval_zero_shot.sh qyxu1994/babylm-2026-strict-small-dialogue-heavy causal evaluation_data/full_eval
Mixture (strict_small_dialogue_heavy)
| Source | Words |
|---|---|
| open_subtitles | 3,999,885 |
| bnc_spoken | 1,999,986 |
| switchboard | 239,559 |
| childes | 2,259,971 |
| gutenberg | 749,839 |
| simple_wiki | 749,927 |
Limitations
Single pretraining seed; 27M parameters; English only; trained on ≤10M words —
a research artifact for sample-efficiency study, not a production model.
Citation
Paper forthcoming (BabyLM Challenge 2026). Please also cite the BabyLM 2026
call for papers (arXiv:2602.20092).