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Related papers: A Law of Next-Token Prediction in Large Language M…

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From extracting features to generating text, the outputs of large language models (LLMs) typically rely on the final layers, following the conventional wisdom that earlier layers capture only low-level cues. However, our analysis shows that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Oscar Skean , Md Rifat Arefin , Dan Zhao , Niket Patel , Jalal Naghiyev , Yann LeCun , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv

Autoregressive language models (LMs) generate one token at a time, yet human reasoning operates over higher-level abstractions - sentences, propositions, and concepts. This contrast raises a central question- Can LMs likewise learn to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Hyeonbin Hwang , Byeongguk Jeon , Seungone Kim , Jiyeon Kim , Hoyeon Chang , Sohee Yang , Seungpil Won , Dohaeng Lee , Youbin Ahn , Minjoon Seo

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zheng Zhao , Yftah Ziser , Shay B. Cohen

Previous work has showcased the intriguing capability of large language models (LLMs) in retrieving facts and processing context knowledge. However, only limited research exists on the layer-wise capability of LLMs to encode knowledge,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Tianjie Ju , Weiwei Sun , Wei Du , Xinwei Yuan , Zhaochun Ren , Gongshen Liu

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Michael Hahn , Navin Goyal

Vector representations of contextual embeddings learned by pre-trained large language models (LLMs) are effective in various downstream tasks in numerical domains such as time series forecasting. Despite their significant benefits, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Rashed Shelim , Shengzhe Xu , Walid Saad , Naren Ramakrishnan

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable advances in recent years, with scaling laws playing a critical role in this rapid progress. In this paper, we empirically investigate how a critical hyper-parameter, i.e., the global batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Xian Shuai , Yiding Wang , Yimeng Wu , Xin Jiang , Xiaozhe Ren

We seek to understand how the representations of individual tokens and the structure of the learned feature space evolve between layers in deep neural networks under different learning objectives. We focus on the Transformers for our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Elena Voita , Rico Sennrich , Ivan Titov

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

In recent years, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in achieving an inference-time few-shot learning capability known as in-context learning. However, existing literature has highlighted the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Xinyi Wang , Wanrong Zhu , Michael Saxon , Mark Steyvers , William Yang Wang

Why do modern language models, trained to do well on next-word prediction, appear to generate coherent documents and capture long-range structure? Here we show that next-token prediction is provably powerful for learning longer-range…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Xinyuan Cao , Santosh S. Vempala

LLMs are statistical models of language learning through stochastic gradient descent with a next token prediction objective. Prompting a popular view among AI modelers: LLMs are just next token predictors. While LLMs are engineered using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Stephen M. Downes , Patrick Forber , Alex Grzankowski

While modern Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved major success in multi-task generalization, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies within their context window. This work introduces a novel approach using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Alok N. Shah , Khush Gupta , Keshav Ramji , Pratik Chaudhari

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

Large language models (LLMs) are typically developed through large-scale pre-training followed by task-specific fine-tuning. Recent advances highlight the importance of an intermediate mid-training stage, where models undergo multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Kaixiang Mo , Yuxin Shi , Weiwei Weng , Zhiqiang Zhou , Shuman Liu , Haibo Zhang , Anxiang Zeng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a new wave of artificial intelligence advancements impacting every scientific field and discipline. We live in a world where most of the data around us, e.g., text, audio, and music, has a…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-11 Prateek Verma

This work studies the general principles of improving the learning of language models (LMs), which aims at reducing the necessary training steps for achieving superior performance. Specifically, we present a theory for the optimal learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Qingxiu Dong , Minlie Huang , Furu Wei

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) usually take input as a concatenation of image token embeddings and text token embeddings and conduct causal modeling. However, their internal behaviors remain underexplored, raising the question of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Houjing Wei , Yuting Shi , Naoya Inoue

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides towards Artificial General Intelligence. However, training these models from scratch requires substantial computational resources and vast amounts of text data. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Wenzhen Zheng , Wenbo Pan , Xu Xu , Libo Qin , Li Yue , Ming Zhou

Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Elif Akata , Konstantinos Voudouris , Vincent Fortuin , Eric Schulz