BabySteps SidBert 100M (BabyLM 2026, strict track)
A GPT-BERT hybrid masked/causal language model trained on the official BabyLM 2026 strict corpus (100M words), submitted by team BabySteps to the 2026 BabyLM Challenge.
The central finding behind this model: under a fixed strong architecture at BabyLM scales, optimizer choice and learning-rate tuning outperformed every data-centric intervention we tried: curriculum-ordered corpora, textbook and story corpora, synthetic data generation, and teacher-supervised auxiliary losses. This model is a faithful GPT-BERT reconstruction trained with the Muon optimizer on the unmodified official corpus, trained on two gpus.
Model details
| Architecture | GPT-BERT (hybrid masked + causal objective) |
| Parameters | ~125M |
| Hidden size / layers / heads | 768 / 12 / 12 |
| Vocabulary | 16,384 (BabyLM GPT-BERT baseline BPE) |
| Training sequence length | 128 |
| Objective | mixed (causal_per_masked = 1) |
| Optimizer | Muon (lr 0.005), auxiliary AdamW-style lr 0.007 |
| Schedule | linear warmup + two-phase decay |
| Steps × tokens/step | 12,330 × 131,072 (~1.6B tokens, ~12 epochs) |
| Precision | bf16 |
| Seed | 42 |
| Hardware | 2 × NVIDIA RTX 5090 (data-parallel) |
| Evaluation mode | MNTP |
Training data
The official BabyLM 2026 strict corpus (100M words) — no custom, synthetic, or augmented data, and no teacher models.
Results (official BabyLM 2026 evaluation pipeline, MNTP)
| Task | Score |
|---|---|
| BLiMP | 78.69 |
| BLiMP Supplement | 72.68 |
| EWoK | 56.20 |
| Entity Tracking | 22.18 |
| COMPS | 57.66 |
| Global PIQA | 36.09 |
| (Super)GLUE (finetuned) | 72.42 |
SuperGLUE per task: BoolQ 71.8 · MNLI 66.2 · MRPC (F1) 90.7 · MultiRC 67.0 · QQP (F1) 77.4 · RTE 70.5 · WSC 63.5 Finetuning recipe: lr 2e-5, seed 42, batch size 4, 10 epochs.
Checkpoints
Intermediate checkpoints are published as branches following the BabyLM naming convention
chck_{N}M, covering the required milestone schedule (1M–10M, 10M–100M, 100M–1000M words seen).
from transformers import AutoModelForMaskedLM, AutoTokenizer
model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained(
"svsatheesh/BabySteps_SidBert-100M-mixed", trust_remote_code=True
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("svsatheesh/BabySteps_SidBert-100M-mixed")
# a specific milestone checkpoint:
early = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained(
"svsatheesh/BabySteps_SidBert-100M-mixed", revision="chck_10M", trust_remote_code=True
)
The model can also be loaded with AutoModelForCausalLM, since GPT-BERT is trained under both objectives.
Reproducibility note
We trained several models with identical configuration and identical seed, differing only in GPU execution. Their scores span a full point of aggregate performance (seven-suite macro average 56.56–57.91, mean 57.31, sd 0.37), with per-suite ranges of 1.8 (BLiMP), 3.6 (BLiMP Supplement), 5.4 (entity tracking), 7.9 (Global PIQA) and 1.7 (SuperGLUE) points. Training is not bit-reproducible under bf16 with non-deterministic CUDA kernels, and small evaluation suites amplify the resulting differences. Point-scale differences between models at this scale should be interpreted with this variance in mind.
We additionally observe that two-GPU data-parallel runs of this configuration score systematically ~1 BLiMP point below single-GPU runs.
Limitations
Trained on 100M words of English only. Not instruction-tuned, not aligned, and not intended for production use — it is a research artifact for studying sample-efficient pretraining. Outputs may be ungrammatical, factually wrong, or reflect biases present in the BabyLM corpus.
Citation
@inproceedings{satheesh2026babysteps,
title = {BabySteps at BabyLM 2026: Optimizer Choice and Hyperparameter Tuning
Beat Data Interventions for Sample-Efficient GPT-BERT Pretraining},
author = {Satheesh, Siddhi; Murillo, Jorge; Chen, Yubei},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the BabyLM Challenge at EMNLP 2026},
year = {2026}
}
Built on GPT-BERT (Charpentier & Samuel, 2024) and the Muon optimizer (Jordan et al., 2024).