This report summarizes the findings from the 3rd BabyLM Challenge and the 1st BabyLM Workshop. The BabyLM Challenge is a shared task aimed at closing the data efficiency gap between human and machine language learners. The goal is to improve the performance of language models given a fixed training budget of no more than 100 million words. This year, the challenge was held as part of an expanded BabyLM Workshop that invited paper submissions on topics relevant to the BabyLM effort, including sample-efficient pretraining and cognitive modeling for LMs. For the challenge, we kept the text-only and text{--}image tracks from previous years, but also introduced a new \textit{interaction} track, where student models are allowed to learn from feedback from larger teacher models. Furthermore, we introduce a new set of evaluation tasks to assess the ``human likeness'' of models on a cognitive and linguistic level, limit the total amount of training compute allowed, and measure performance on intermediate checkpoints. We observe that new training objectives and architectures tend to produce the best-performing approaches, and that interaction with teacher models can yield high-quality language models. The strict and interaction tracks saw submissions that outperformed the best-performing methods from previous years. We do not observe a complete correlation between training FLOPs and performance. {\%}, suggesting that some methods can produce real gains beyond allowing us to spend more compute. This year{\'}s BabyLM Challenge shows that there is still room to innovate in a data-constrained setting, and that community-driven research can yield actionable insights for language modeling.
@inproceedings{charpentier-etal-2025-findings,
title = "Findings of the Third {B}aby{LM} Challenge: Accelerating Language Modeling Research with Cognitively Plausible Data",
author = "Charpentier, Lucas and
Choshen, Leshem and
Cotterell, Ryan and
Gul, Mustafa Omer and
Hu, Michael Y. and
Liu, Jing and
Jumelet, Jaap and
Linzen, Tal and
Mueller, Aaron and
Ross, Candance and
Shah, Raj Sanjay and
Warstadt, Alex and
Wilcox, Ethan Gotlieb and
Williams, Adina",
editor = "Charpentier, Lucas and
Choshen, Leshem and
Cotterell, Ryan and
Gul, Mustafa Omer and
Hu, Michael Y. and
Liu, Jing and
Jumelet, Jaap and
Linzen, Tal and
Mueller, Aaron and
Ross, Candace and
Shah, Raj Sanjay and
Warstadt, Alex and
Wilcox, Ethan Gotlieb and
Williams, Adina",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the First BabyLM Workshop",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.babylm-main.28/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.babylm-main.28",
pages = "399--420",
ISBN = "TODO",
abstract = "This report summarizes the findings from the 3rd BabyLM Challenge and the 1st BabyLM Workshop. The BabyLM Challenge is a shared task aimed at closing the data efficiency gap between human and machine language learners. The goal is to improve the performance of language models given a fixed training budget of no more than 100 million words. This year, the challenge was held as part of an expanded BabyLM Workshop that invited paper submissions on topics relevant to the BabyLM effort, including sample-efficient pretraining and cognitive modeling for LMs. For the challenge, we kept the text-only and text{--}image tracks from previous years, but also introduced a new \textit{interaction} track, where student models are allowed to learn from feedback from larger teacher models. Furthermore, we introduce a new set of evaluation tasks to assess the ``human likeness'' of models on a cognitive and linguistic level, limit the total amount of training compute allowed, and measure performance on intermediate checkpoints. We observe that new training objectives and architectures tend to produce the best-performing approaches, and that interaction with teacher models can yield high-quality language models. The strict and interaction tracks saw submissions that outperformed the best-performing methods from previous years. We do not observe a complete correlation between training FLOPs and performance. {\%}, suggesting that some methods can produce real gains beyond allowing us to spend more compute. This year{\'}s BabyLM Challenge shows that there is still room to innovate in a data-constrained setting, and that community-driven research can yield actionable insights for language modeling."
}
See the full reference list in the paper.