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Natural language processing (NLP) enables the understanding and generation of meaningful human language, typically using a pre-trained complex architecture on a large dataset to learn the language and next fine-tune its weights to implement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Yarden Tzach , Ronit D. Gross , Ella Koresh , Shalom Rosner , Or Shpringer , Tal Halevi , Ido Kanter

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable progress. Despite their success, next-token prediction (NTP), the dominant method for LLM training and inference, is constrained in both contextual coverage and inference efficiency due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xiaohao Liu , Xiaobo Xia , Weixiang Zhao , Manyi Zhang , Xianzhi Yu , Xiu Su , Shuo Yang , See-Kiong Ng , Tat-Seng Chua

Large language models (LLMs) process and predict sequences containing text to answer questions, and address tasks including document summarization, providing recommendations, writing software and solving quantitative problems. We provide a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Ricardo Baptista , Andrew Stuart , Son Tran

Modern language models predict the next token in the sequence by considering the past text through a powerful function such as attention. However, language models have no explicit mechanism that allows them to spend computation time for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Florian Mai , Nathan Cornille , Marie-Francine Moens

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results on various language and vision tasks. Recently, there has been growing interest in applying LLMs to graph-based tasks, particularly on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Zhongmou He , Jing Zhu , Shengyi Qian , Joyce Chai , Danai Koutra

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have outperformed human experts in predicting the results of neuroscience experiments (Luo et al., 2024). What is the basis for this performance? One possibility is that statistical patterns in that…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-07-03 Xiaoliang Luo , Guangzhi Sun , Bradley C. Love

As large language models (LLMs) continue to be deployed and utilized across domains, the volume of LLM-generated data is growing rapidly. This trend highlights the increasing importance of effective and lossless compression for such data in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yu Mao , Holger Pirk , Chun Jason Xue

The next-token prediction (NTP) objective trains language models to predict a single token at each step, even though many continuations can express the same meaning. For example, in the sentence ``this sticker can be placed here'',…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Christine Zhang , Dan Jurafsky , Chen Shani

Multi-token prediction (MTP) has been proposed as an auxiliary objective to improve next-token prediction (NTP) in language model training but shows inconsistent improvements, underperforming in standard NLP benchmarks. We found MTP's exact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Zayd M. K. Zuhri , Erland Hilman Fuadi , Alham Fikri Aji

Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable…

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) makes it important to recognize their strengths and limitations. We argue that in order to develop a holistic understanding of these systems we need to consider the problem that they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-26 R. Thomas McCoy , Shunyu Yao , Dan Friedman , Matthew Hardy , Thomas L. Griffiths

Large language models such as GPT and Llama are trained with a next-token prediction loss. In this work, we suggest that training language models to predict multiple future tokens at once results in higher sample efficiency. More…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Fabian Gloeckle , Badr Youbi Idrissi , Baptiste Rozière , David Lopez-Paz , Gabriel Synnaeve

Length generalization refers to the ability to extrapolate from short training sequences to long test sequences and is a challenge for current large language models. While prior work has proposed some architecture or data format changes to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Kaiying Hou , David Brandfonbrener , Sham Kakade , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

Large Language Models achieve next-token prediction by transporting a vectorized piece of text (prompt) across an accompanying embedding space under the action of successive transformer layers. The resulting high-dimensional trajectories…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Raphaël Sarfati , Toni J. B. Liu , Nicolas Boullé , Christopher J. Earls

Prompt engineering has emerged as a powerful technique for guiding large language models (LLMs) toward desired responses, significantly enhancing their performance across diverse tasks. Beyond their role as static predictors, LLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Ryumei Nakada , Wenlong Ji , Tianxi Cai , James Zou , Linjun Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

Text representation plays a critical role in tasks like clustering, retrieval, and other downstream applications. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in harnessing their capabilities for this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Yeqin Zhang , Yizheng Zhao , Chen Hu , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Ruihang Miao , Cam-Tu Nguyen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

Multi-task learning (MTL) has recently contributed to learning better representations in service of various NLP tasks. MTL aims at improving the performance of a primary task, by jointly training on a secondary task. This paper introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-09-21 Davis Liang , Yan Shu

Large language models such as GPT and Llama are trained with a next-token prediction loss. In this work, we suggest that training language models to predict multiple future tokens at once results in higher sample efficiency. More…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Athul Radhakrishnan , Siddhant Mohan , Mahima Sachdeva