CLASS-IT: Conversational and Lecture-Aligned Small-Scale Instruction Tuning for BabyLMs

luca capone, Alessandro Bondielli, Alessandro Lenci

CLASS-IT: Conversational and Lecture-Aligned Small-Scale Instruction Tuning for BabyLMs: 5 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #20 of 29 papers on 2025-10-31. Day-by-day upvote history.

This work investigates whether small-scale LMs can benefit from instruction tuning. We compare conversational and question-answering instruction tuning datasets, applied either in a merged or sequential curriculum, using decoder-only models with 100M and 140M parameters. Evaluation spans both fine-tuning (SuperGLUE) and zero-shot (BLiMP, EWoK, WUGs, entity tracking, and psycholinguistic correlation) settings. Results show that instruction tuning yields small but consistent gains in fine-tuning scenarios, with sequential curricula outperforming merged data; however, improvements do not consistently transfer to zero-shot tasks, suggesting a trade-off between interaction-focused adaptation and broad linguistic generalization. These results highlight both the potential and the constraints of adapting human-inspired learning strategies to low-resource LMs, and point toward hybrid, curriculum-based approaches for enhancing generalization under ecological training limits.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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