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arXiv · 2510.20411

Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction

Suchir Salhan·Hongyi Gu·Donya Rooein·Diana Galvan-Sosa·Gabrielle Gaudeau·Andrew Caines·Zheng Yuan·Paula Buttery
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Abstract

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.

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Suchir Salhan, Hongyi Gu, Donya Rooein, Diana Galvan-Sosa, Gabrielle Gaudeau, Andrew Caines, Zheng Yuan, Paula Buttery. 2025-10-23. Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20411

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