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Related papers: LLMs are Not Just Next Token Predictors

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The advent of large language models (LLMs) has enabled significant performance gains in the field of natural language processing. However, recent studies have found that LLMs often resort to shortcuts when performing tasks, creating an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Geetanjali Bihani , Julia Taylor Rayz

Aligning language models (LMs) with preferences is an important problem in natural language generation. A key challenge is that preferences are typically provided at the sequence level while LM training and generation both occur at the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Shentao Yang , Shujian Zhang , Congying Xia , Yihao Feng , Caiming Xiong , Mingyuan Zhou

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in general language understanding tasks. However, as a family of generative methods with the objective of next token prediction, the semantic evolution with the depth of these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Zhu Liu , Cunliang Kong , Ying Liu , Maosong Sun

Speech Language Models (SLMs) aim to learn language from raw audio, without textual resources. Despite significant advances, our current models exhibit weak syntax and semantic abilities. However, if the scaling properties of neural…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-13 Santiago Cuervo , Ricard Marxer

Standard evaluations of Large language models (LLMs) focus on task performance, offering limited insight into whether correct behavior reflects appropriate underlying mechanisms and risking confirmation bias. We introduce a simple,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Zoë Prins , Samuele Punzo , Frank Wildenburg , Giovanni Cinà , Sandro Pezzelle

Can a machine understand the meanings of natural language? Recent developments in the generative large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence have led to the belief that traditional philosophical assumptions about machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Vladimír Havlík

Language is typically modelled with discrete sequences. However, the most successful approaches to language modelling, namely neural networks, are continuous and smooth function approximators. In this work, we show that Transformer-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Samuele Marro , Davide Evangelista , X. Angelo Huang , Emanuele La Malfa , Michele Lombardi , Michael Wooldridge

Modelling student knowledge is a key challenge when leveraging AI in education, with major implications for personalised learning. The Knowledge Tracing (KT) task aims to predict how students will respond to educational questions in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Max Norris , Kobi Gal , Sahan Bulathwela

Masked language modeling (MLM) is one of the key sub-tasks in vision-language pretraining. In the cross-modal setting, tokens in the sentence are masked at random, and the model predicts the masked tokens given the image and the text. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Yonatan Bitton , Gabriel Stanovsky , Michael Elhadad , Roy Schwartz

Large Language Models (LLMs) solely trained on next-token prediction learn to solve a wide range of problems involving mathematical reasoning. But how does this ability evolve during training? We show the first analysis of how mathematical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Shubhra Mishra , Gabriel Poesia , Noah D. Goodman

Transformer-based models primarily rely on Next Token Prediction (NTP), which predicts the next token in a sequence based on the preceding context. However, NTP's focus on single-token prediction often limits a model's ability to plan ahead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Charlie Wyatt , Aditya Joshi , Flora Salim

Using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) as a backbone for time series prediction has recently attracted growing research interest. Existing approaches typically split time series into patches, map them to the token space of LLMs via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xinyu Zhang , Shanshan Feng , Xutao Li , Kenghong Lin , Fan Li , Pengfei Jia

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art for natural language tasks. Recent work has attempted to decode, by reverse engineering the role of linear layers, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs arrive at their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Mansi Sakarvadia , Arham Khan , Aswathy Ajith , Daniel Grzenda , Nathaniel Hudson , André Bauer , Kyle Chard , Ian Foster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed text generation through inherently probabilistic context-aware mechanisms, mimicking human natural language. In this paper, we systematically investigate the performance of various LLMs when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Javier Coronado-Blázquez

Language models have consistently grown to compress more world knowledge into their parameters, but the knowledge that can be pretrained into them is upper-bounded by their parameter size. Especially the capacity of Small Language Models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Szilvia Ujváry , Louis Béthune , Pierre Ablin , João Monteiro , Marco Cuturi , Michael Kirchhof

Trained Transformers have been shown to compute abstract features that appear redundant for predicting the immediate next token. We identify which components of the gradient signal from the next-token prediction objective give rise to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mark Rofin , Jalal Naghiyev , Michael Hahn

Large Language Models (LLMs) are huge artificial neural networks which primarily serve to generate text, but also provide a very sophisticated probabilistic model of language use. Since generating a semantically consistent text requires a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Romuald A. Janik

Algorithmic trading requires short-term tactical decisions consistent with long-term financial objectives. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to such problems, but adoption is limited by myopic behaviour and opaque policies. Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Adam Darmanin , Vince Vella

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Xiaojuan Tang , Zilong Zheng , Jiaqi Li , Fanxu Meng , Song-Chun Zhu , Yitao Liang , Muhan Zhang

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu