English

LoopMTP: A looped transformer guided by latent multi-token prediction

Computation and Language 2026-08-04 v1

Abstract

Looped transformers have emerged as a parameter-efficient alternative to scaling depth for strong reasoning. By reusing one stack of layers across TT iterations, they attain the effective depth and reasoning capabilities of larger models at a fixed parameter count. Yet existing approaches suffer from latent overthinking and undifferentiated computation, largely because intermediate representations receive no guidance across loops. Multi-token prediction (MTP) supplies exactly the dense, forward-looking supervision the loop is missing. We propose \textsc{LoopMTP}, which links the two through a structural correspondence in latent space: a model that loops TT times can anticipate TT future tokens. \textsc{LoopMTP} realizes this by softly aligning the hidden state of loop tt with the embedding of the token tt steps ahead, while a lightweight gate preserves useful information across iterations. \textsc{LoopMTP} improves average accuracy by up to 8.1\% (relative) over the non-looped baseline, with training remaining stable for up to 15 loops.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.03624,
  title  = {LoopMTP: A looped transformer guided by latent multi-token prediction},
  author = {Behzad Shomali and Markus Frey and David Berghaus and Joachim Koehler and Mehdi Ali},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.03624},
  year   = {2026}
}