# BAMBINO-LM: (Bilingual-)Human-Inspired Continual Pretraining of BabyLM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11418 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11418/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00582/) (2019)
- [A standardized Project Gutenberg corpus for statistical analysis of natural language and quantitative linguistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08092/) (2018)
- [As Good as New. How to Successfully Recycle English GPT-2 to Make Models for Other Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05628/) (2020)
- [Language acquisition: do children and language models follow similar learning stages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03586/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Study of Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Generation with Pseudo-Target Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02031/) (2023)
- [SLABERT Talk Pretty One Day: Modeling Second Language Acquisition with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19589/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10159/) (2025)
- [IPA-CHILDES & G2P+: Feature-Rich Resources for Cross-Lingual Phonology and Phonemic Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03036/) (2025)
- [Bringing Up a Bilingual BabyLM: Investigating Multilingual Language Acquisition Using Small-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29552/) (2026)
- [Learning from Child-Directed Speech in Two-Language Scenarios: A French-English Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12906/) (2026)
- [Cross-Linguistic Effects in Bilingual Phoneme BabyLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37121/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Children from bilingual backgrounds benefit from interactions with parents and teachers to re-acquire their heritage language. In this paper, we investigate how this insight from behavioral study can be incorporated into the learning of small-scale language models. We introduce BAMBINO-LM, a continual pre-training strategy for BabyLM that uses a novel combination of alternation and PPO-based perplexity reward induced from a parent Italian model. Upon evaluation on zero-shot classification tasks for English and Italian, BAMBINO-LM improves the Italian language capability of a BabyLM baseline. Our ablation analysis demonstrates that employing both the alternation strategy and PPO-based modeling is key to this effectiveness gain. We also show that, as a side effect, the proposed method leads to a similar degradation in L1 effectiveness as human children would have had in an equivalent learning scenario. Through its modeling and findings, BAMBINO-LM makes a focused contribution to the pre-training of small-scale language models by first developing a human-inspired strategy for pre-training and then showing that it results in behaviours similar to that of humans.