We create two German-only decoder models, LL\"aMmlein 120M and 1B, transparently from scratch and publish them, along with the training data, for the German NLP research community to use. The model training involved several key steps, including extensive data preprocessing, the creation of a custom German tokenizer, the training itself, as well as the evaluation of the final models on various benchmarks. Throughout the training process, multiple checkpoints were saved and analyzed using the SuperGLEBer benchmark to monitor the models' learning dynamics. Compared to state-of-the-art models on the SuperGLEBer benchmark, both LL\"aMmlein models performed competitively, consistently matching or surpassing models with similar parameter sizes. The results show that the models' quality scales with size as expected, but performance improvements on some tasks plateaued early, offering valuable insights into resource allocation for future model development.

Analyzing, understanding, and describing human behavior is advantageous in different settings, such as web browsing or traffic navigation. Understanding human behavior naturally helps to improve and optimize the underlying infrastructure or user interfaces. Typically, human navigation is represented by sequences of transitions between states. Previous work suggests to use hypotheses, representing different intuitions about the navigation to analyze these transitions. To mathematically grasp this setting, first-order Markov chains are used to capture the behavior, consequently allowing to apply different kinds of graph comparisons, but comes with the inherent drawback of losing information about higher-order dependencies within the sequences. To this end, we propose to analyze entire sequences using autoregressive language models, as they are traditionally used to model higher-order dependencies in sequences. We show that our approach can be easily adapted to model different settings introduced in previous work, namely HypTrails, MixedTrails and even SubTrails, while at the same time bringing unique advantages: 1. Modeling higher-order dependencies between state transitions, while 2. being able to identify short comings in proposed hypotheses, and 3. naturally introducing a unified approach to model all settings. To show the expressiveness of our approach, we evaluate our approach on different synthetic datasets and conclude with an exemplary analysis of a real-world dataset, examining the behavior of users who interact with voice assistants.

Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of natural language tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using several of its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular natural language models. The infrastructure, datacards and robustness analysis results are available publicly on the NL-Augmenter repository (\url{https://github.com/GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter}).