Mask and You Shall Receive: Optimizing Masked Language Modeling For Pretraining BabyLMs

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Lukas Edman, Alexander Fraser

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 02 Feb 2026CoRR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: We describe our strategy for the 2025 edition of the BabyLM Challenge. Our main contribution is that of an improved form of Masked Language Modeling (MLM), which adapts the probabilities of the tokens masked according to the model's ability to predict them. The results show a substantial increase in performance on (Super)GLUE tasks over the standard MLM. We also incorporate sub-token embeddings, finding that this increases the model's morphological generalization capabilities. Our submission beats the baseline in the strict-small track.