Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866909865165717504 |
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| author | Salhan, Suchir Gu, Hongyi Rooein, Donya Galvan-Sosa, Diana Gaudeau, Gabrielle Caines, Andrew Yuan, Zheng Buttery, Paula |
| author_facet | Salhan, Suchir Gu, Hongyi Rooein, Donya Galvan-Sosa, Diana Gaudeau, Gabrielle Caines, Andrew Yuan, Zheng Buttery, Paula |
| contents | Multi-turn dialogues between a child and a caregiver are characterized by a property called contingency - that is, prompt, direct, and meaningful exchanges between interlocutors. We introduce ContingentChat, a teacher-student framework that benchmarks and improves multi-turn contingency in a BabyLM trained on 100M words. Using a novel alignment dataset for post-training, BabyLM generates responses that are more grammatical and cohesive. Experiments with adaptive teacher decoding strategies show limited additional gains. ContingentChat demonstrates the benefits of targeted post-training for dialogue quality and indicates that contingency remains a challenging goal for BabyLMs. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_20411 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction Salhan, Suchir Gu, Hongyi Rooein, Donya Galvan-Sosa, Diana Gaudeau, Gabrielle Caines, Andrew Yuan, Zheng Buttery, Paula Computation and Language Multi-turn dialogues between a child and a caregiver are characterized by a property called contingency - that is, prompt, direct, and meaningful exchanges between interlocutors. We introduce ContingentChat, a teacher-student framework that benchmarks and improves multi-turn contingency in a BabyLM trained on 100M words. Using a novel alignment dataset for post-training, BabyLM generates responses that are more grammatical and cohesive. Experiments with adaptive teacher decoding strategies show limited additional gains. ContingentChat demonstrates the benefits of targeted post-training for dialogue quality and indicates that contingency remains a challenging goal for BabyLMs. |
| title | Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20411 |