📰 BabyLM Workshop 2025 — accepted papers

BabyLM Workshop 2025 is the 2025 edition of the BabyLM Workshop, held in Suzhou, China, November 2025 (publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics). The ACL Anthology lists 41 papers of it; our library holds 6 with our summaries. Below: the most cited papers, every accepted paper, and ours with their topics, authors and institutions.

📍 Suzhou, China · 🗓 November 2025

Most cited papers

By their OpenAlex citations; a paper with our summary links to its page here, the others to the original.

1. Findings of the Third BabyLM Challenge: Accelerating Language Modeling Research with Cognitively Plausible Data ↗Lucas Charpentier, Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell et al.2 citations
2. Are BabyLMs Deaf to Gricean Maxims? A Pragmatic Evaluation of Sample-efficient Language ModelsRaha Askari, Sina Zarrieß, Özge Alacam et al.1 citation · our summary
3. Dialogue Is Not Enough to Make a Communicative BabyLM (But Neither Is Developmentally Inspired Reinforcement Learning) ↗Francesca Padovani, Bastian Bunzeck, Manar Ali et al.1 citation
4. Influence-driven Curriculum Learning for Pre-training on Limited Data ↗Loris Schoenegger, Lukas Thoma, Terra Blevins et al.1 citation
5. Large Language Models and Children Have Different Learning Trajectories in Determiner Acquisition ↗Olivia La Fiandra, Nathalie Fernandez Echeverri, Patrick Shafto et al.1 citation
6. Mask and You Shall Receive: Optimizing Masked Language Modeling For Pretraining BabyLMs ↗Lukas Edman, Alexander Fraser1 citation
7. Once Upon a Time: Interactive Learning for Storytelling with Small Language Models ↗Jonas Mayer Martins, Ali Hamza Bashir, Muhammad Rehan Khalid et al.1 citation
8. Sample-Efficient Language Modeling with Linear Attention and Lightweight Enhancements ↗Patrick Haller, Jonas Golde, Alan Akbik1 citation
9. Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction ↗Suchir Salhan, Hongyi Gu, Donya Rooein et al.1 citation

All accepted papers (41)

The most cited first; 6 with our summary link to their page here, the others to the original.

1. Findings of the Third BabyLM Challenge: Accelerating Language Modeling Research with Cognitively Plausible Data ↗Lucas Charpentier, Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell et al.2 citations
2. Are BabyLMs Deaf to Gricean Maxims? A Pragmatic Evaluation of Sample-efficient Language ModelsRaha Askari, Sina Zarrieß, Özge Alacam et al.1 citation · our summary
3. Dialogue Is Not Enough to Make a Communicative BabyLM (But Neither Is Developmentally Inspired Reinforcement Learning) ↗Francesca Padovani, Bastian Bunzeck, Manar Ali et al.1 citation
4. Influence-driven Curriculum Learning for Pre-training on Limited Data ↗Loris Schoenegger, Lukas Thoma, Terra Blevins et al.1 citation
5. Large Language Models and Children Have Different Learning Trajectories in Determiner Acquisition ↗Olivia La Fiandra, Nathalie Fernandez Echeverri, Patrick Shafto et al.1 citation
6. Mask and You Shall Receive: Optimizing Masked Language Modeling For Pretraining BabyLMs ↗Lukas Edman, Alexander Fraser1 citation
7. Once Upon a Time: Interactive Learning for Storytelling with Small Language Models ↗Jonas Mayer Martins, Ali Hamza Bashir, Muhammad Rehan Khalid et al.1 citation
8. Sample-Efficient Language Modeling with Linear Attention and Lightweight Enhancements ↗Patrick Haller, Jonas Golde, Alan Akbik1 citation
9. Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction ↗Suchir Salhan, Hongyi Gu, Donya Rooein et al.1 citation
10. A Comparison of Elementary Baselines for BabyLM ↗Rareș Păpușoi, Sergiu Nisioi
11. A Morpheme-Aware Child-Inspired Language Model ↗Necva Bölücü, Burcu Can
12. Active Curriculum Language Modeling over a Hybrid Pre-training Method ↗Eleni Fysikoudi, Sharid Loáiciga, Asad B. Sayeed
13. BLiSS: Evaluating Bilingual Learner Competence in Second Language Small Language Models ↗Yuan Gao, Suchir Salhan, Andrew Caines et al.
14. Babies Learn to Look Ahead: Multi-Token Prediction in Small LMsAnsar Aynetdinov, Alan Akbikour summary
15. Batch-wise Convergent Pre-training: Step-by-Step Learning Inspired by Child Language DevelopmentKo Yoshida, Daiki Shiono, Kai Sato et al.our summary
16. Beyond Repetition: Text Simplification and Curriculum Learning for Data-Constrained Pretraining ↗Matthew Theodore Roque, Dan John Velasco
17. BitMar: Low-Bit Multimodal Fusion with Episodic Memory for Edge DevicesEuhid Aman, Esteban Carlin, Hsing-Kuo Kenneth Pao et al.our summary
18. CLASS-IT: Conversational and Lecture-Aligned Small-Scale Instruction Tuning for BabyLMs ↗Luca Capone, Alessandro Bondielli, Alessandro Lenci
19. Contrastive Decoding for Synthetic Data Generation in Low-Resource Language Modeling ↗Jannek Ulm, Kevin Du, Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson
20. CurLL: A Developmental Framework to Evaluate Continual Learning in Language Models ↗Pavan Kalyan Tankala, Shubhra Mishra, Satya Lokam et al.
21. Design and Analysis of few Million Parameter Transformer-based Language Models trained over a few Million Tokens Dataset ↗Yen-Che Hsiao, Abhishek Dutta
22. Do Syntactic Categories Help in Developmentally Motivated Curriculum Learning for Language Models? ↗Arzu Burcu Güven, Anna Rogers, Rob van der Goot
23. Exploring smaller batch sizes for a high-performing BabyLM model architecture ↗Sharid Loáiciga, Eleni Fysikoudi, Asad B. Sayeed
24. FORGETTER with forgetful hyperparameters and recurring sleeps can continue to learn beyond normal overtfitting limits ↗Yamamoto Rui, Keiji Miura
25. Linguistic Units as Tokens: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation with BabyLM ↗Achille Fusco, Maria Letizia Piccini Bianchessi, Tommaso Sgrizzi et al.

See all 41 papers in BabyLM Workshop 2025 — accepted papers →

📄 Papers with our summary in our library (6)

The most cited first (OpenAlex citations plus our library's).

1. Are BabyLMs Deaf to Gricean Maxims? A Pragmatic Evaluation of Sample-efficient Language ModelsBabyLM WorkshopRaha Askari, Sina Zarrieß, Özge Alacam, et al.2025 · 4 citations
2. TafBERTa: Learning Grammatical Rules from Small-Scale Language Acquisition Data in HebrewAnita Gelboim, Elior Sulem2025 · 3 citations
3. What did you say? Generating Child-Directed Speech Questions to Train LLMsBabyLM WorkshopWhitney Poh, Michael Tombolini, Libby Barak2025 · 3 citations
4. BitMar: Low-Bit Multimodal Fusion with Episodic Memory for Edge DevicesBabyLM WorkshopEuhid Aman, Esteban Carlin, Hsing-Kuo Kenneth Pao, et al.2025 · 1 citation
5. Babies Learn to Look Ahead: Multi-Token Prediction in Small LMsBabyLM WorkshopAnsar Aynetdinov, Alan Akbik2025 · 1 citation
6. Batch-wise Convergent Pre-training: Step-by-Step Learning Inspired by Child Language DevelopmentBabyLM WorkshopKo Yoshida, Daiki Shiono, Kai Sato, et al.2025 · 1 citation

🧭 Top topics

Topics of its works in our library, with the number of works on each.

🧠Language models & pretraining (3)🧒Psycholinguistics & language acquisition (3)😉Implicature (1)📏Evaluation & benchmarks (1)🕎Hebrew & Aramaic (1)Semitic languages (1)🖼️Vision & language (1)Modern Hebrew (1)

📚 Fields

🎭Arts and Humanities (5)🖥️Computer Science (5)💭Psychology (3)

🧑‍🔬 Top authors

Authors with a page who published here most often: their works here, and the citations of those works.

🏛️ Top institutions

Institutions on the bylines of its works here, by the number of works.

🎓Ben-Gurion University of the NegevBeersheba · Israel1 work here🎓National Taiwan University of Science and TechnologyTaipei · Taiwan1 work here🎓Montclair State UniversityMontclair · United States1 work here🎓Bielefeld UniversityBielefeld · Germany1 work here🎓Tohoku UniversitySendai · Japan1 work here🎓Polytechnique MontréalMontreal · Canada1 work here🎓University of TurinTurin · Italy1 work here

Place and dates from the event's site or the ACL Anthology; works and citations from OpenAlex and our library.

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