BabyVLM: Data-Efficient Pretraining of VLMs Inspired by Infant Learning

Shengao Wang, Arjun Chandra, Aoming Liu, Venkatesh Saligrama, Boqing Gong; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 1380-1390

Human infants rapidly develop visual reasoning skills from minimal input, suggesting that developmentally inspired pretraining could significantly enhance the efficiency of vision-language models (VLMs). Although recent efforts have leveraged infant-inspired datasets like SAYCam, existing evaluation benchmarks remain misaligned--they are either too simplistic, narrowly scoped, or tailored for large-scale pretrained models. Additionally, training exclusively on SAYCam overlooks the broader, diverse input from which infants naturally learn. To address these limitations, we propose BabyVLM, a novel framework comprising diverse in-domain evaluation benchmarks and a synthetic training dataset created via child-directed transformations of existing datasets. We demonstrate that VLMs trained with our synthetic dataset achieve superior performance on BabyVLM tasks compared to models trained solely on SAYCam or general-purpose data of the SAYCam size. BabyVLM thus provides a robust, developmentally aligned evaluation tool and illustrates how compact models trained on carefully curated data can generalize effectively, opening pathways toward data-efficient vision-language learning paradigms.