arXiv AI
Oct 28

Specialization, Diversity, and Scaling in Child-Scale Language Models

The study trains small GPT‑2 models on child‑scale language data from dense home recordings (BabyView) and synthetic child‑directed dialogue (TinyDialogues), varying data amount, source, and diversity. Models trained on a single child’s environment predict that child’s language far better than others, a pattern largely driven by lexical and distributional factors as shown by a 5‑gram baseline. While training on multiple children improves predictions on pooled held‑out language, it does not yield a clear advantage on grammatical benchmarks, and naturalistic versus synthetic inputs produce distinct grammatical and lexical‑semantic patterns.

By Steven Y. Feng, Michael C. Frank
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Learning Natural Conversational Behavior in Tandem Speech-to-Speech Models with Randomized Guidance

The paper introduces a method called randomized intermediate guidance for training tandem speech-to-speech models, where a large language model (LLM) acts as a backend providing candidate responses while the user is speaking. Instead of simulating the backend’s guidance, the approach derives guidance directly from the conversation corpus, using target responses for informative guidance and randomly sampled responses to simulate irrelevant updates. Experiments on synthetic dialogues and 3.8k hours of real conversations show that this technique yields response quality comparable to LLM-generated baselines while improving natural turn‑taking and audio‑judge naturalness.

By Manato Yaguchi, Yotaro Kubo, Hikaru Asano, So Kuroki
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

Cross-Linguistic Effects in Bilingual Phoneme BabyLMs

arXiv:2609.37121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-linguistic effects are a central topic in bilingual first-language acquisition. Artificial learners can help investigate L1-L2 interactions by en...

By Nikitas Theodoropoulos, Maria Lymperaiou, Giorgos Filandrianos
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

SPEARBench: A Benchmark for Naturalness Evaluation in Streaming Speech-to-Speech Language Models

Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech. However, standard speech and text benchmarks do not capture whether these systems behave naturally in conversations, where timing, turn-taking, prosody, interpersonal stance, language and dialect consistency, and relationship-aware appropriateness jointly shape perceived quality.