A surprisal oracle for when every layer counts

Xudong Hong, Sharid Loáiciga, Asad Sayeed


Abstract
Active Curriculum Language Modeling (ACLM; Hong et al., 2023) is a learner-directed approach to training a language model. We proposed the original version of this process in our submission to the BabyLM 2023 task, and now we propose an updated ACLM process for the BabyLM 2024 task. ACLM involves an iteratively-and dynamically-constructed curriculum informed over the training process by a model of uncertainty; other training items that are similarly uncertain to a least certain candidate item are prioritized. Our new process improves the similarity model so that it is more dynamic, and we run ACLM over the most successful model from the BabyLM 2023 task: ELC-BERT (Charpentier and Samuel, 2023). We find that while our models underperform on fine-grained grammatical inferences, they outperform the BabyLM 2024 official base-lines on common-sense and world-knowledge tasks. We make our code available at https://github.com/asayeed/ActiveBaby.
Anthology ID:
2024.conll-babylm.21
Volume:
The 2nd BabyLM Challenge at the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, FL, USA
Editors:
Michael Y. Hu, Aaron Mueller, Candace Ross, Adina Williams, Tal Linzen, Chengxu Zhuang, Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell, Alex Warstadt, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
Venues:
CoNLL | BabyLM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
237–243
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.conll-babylm.21/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xudong Hong, Sharid Loáiciga, and Asad Sayeed. 2024. A surprisal oracle for when every layer counts. In The 2nd BabyLM Challenge at the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 237–243, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A surprisal oracle for when every layer counts (Hong et al., CoNLL-BabyLM 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.conll-babylm.21.pdf