babylm-2026-mtl-bigckpt

babylm-2026-mtl-bigckpt

A 213M-parameter GPT-2-style causal language model submitted to the multilingual track of the BabyLM 2026 Challenge (English, Dutch, Chinese), trained from scratch within the 100M English-equivalent-word budget.

This is the overall submission. It obtained a leaderboard-reported Multilingual Average of 50.68.

Model details

Training data

Trained within the fixed multilingual budget on a combination of:

• the official BabyBabelLM corpora for English, Dutch, and Chinese;
• parallel-corpus text from Tatoeba and OPUS-100;
• task-family-targeted synthetic text generated offline by an approved teacher model (Qwen3.5-4B).

Published training data: 1ghub/babylm-2026-mtl-data

Note on budget. The track measures the budget in bytes: the 100M-word tier is 543.00 MB, and a corpus qualifies while its UTF-8 size divided by the language premium stays at or below that. We use the coefficients published in the organizers' table: English 1.0, Dutch 1.0516, and simplified Chinese 0.93597, the script BabyBabelLM uses. (The 0.9894 listed in the call for papers is the coefficient that table gives for traditional Chinese.) Under this rule the training corpus is 527.7 MB of English-equivalent bytes, 97.2% of the cap.

Results

Development-set scores (percentages):

Intended use and limitations

Research model for data-efficient multilingual language modeling under the BabyLM setting. It is a small model trained on a developmentally plausible amount of text and is not intended for production use. Scores are on development sets; evaluation reuse across selection stages introduces selection bias.

Teacher model

Synthetic training text was generated (not distilled) by Qwen3.5-4B, an approved teacher for the challenge. Generation prompts used task-level descriptions.

Citation

Companion paper: Language Allocation and Targeted Data Design for a Multilingual BabyLM (BabyLM 2026 Workshop, EMNLP 2026).