English

Multi-Token Prediction Needs Registers

Computation and Language 2025-05-16 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

Multi-token prediction has emerged as a promising objective for improving language model pretraining, but its benefits have not consistently generalized to other settings such as fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose MuToR, a simple and effective approach to multi-token prediction that interleaves learnable register tokens into the input sequence, each tasked with predicting future targets. Compared to existing methods, MuToR offers several key advantages: it introduces only a negligible number of additional parameters, requires no architectural changes--ensuring compatibility with off-the-shelf pretrained language models--and remains aligned with the next-token pretraining objective, making it especially well-suited for supervised fine-tuning. Moreover, it naturally supports scalable prediction horizons. We demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of MuToR across a range of use cases, including supervised fine-tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), and pretraining, on challenging generative tasks in both language and vision domains. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/nasosger/MuToR.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.10518,
  title  = {Multi-Token Prediction Needs Registers},
  author = {Anastasios Gerontopoulos and Spyros Gidaris and Nikos Komodakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.10518},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:34:49.419Z