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Related papers: On Next-Token Prediction in LLMs: How End Goals De…

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Top-$k$ decoding is a widely used method for sampling from LLMs: at each token, only the largest $k$ next-token-probabilities are kept, and the next token is sampled after re-normalizing them to sum to unity. Top-$k$ and other sampling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Georgy Noarov , Soham Mallick , Tao Wang , Sunay Joshi , Yan Sun , Yangxinyu Xie , Mengxin Yu , Edgar Dobriban

Due to the fundamental connection between next-symbol prediction and compression, modern predictive models, such as large language models (LLMs), can be combined with entropy coding to achieve compression rates that surpass those of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Cordelia Hu , Jennifer Tang

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

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu

Large language models (LLMs) has experienced exponential growth, they demonstrate remarkable performance across various tasks. Notwithstanding, contemporary research primarily centers on enhancing the size and quality of pretraining data,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Mengnan Qi , Yufan Huang , Yongqiang Yao , Maoquan Wang , Bin Gu , Neel Sundaresan

The automated detection of hallucinations and training data contamination is pivotal to the safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). These tasks are particularly challenging in settings where no access to model internals is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Guy Bar-Shalom , Fabrizio Frasca , Derek Lim , Yoav Gelberg , Yftah Ziser , Ran El-Yaniv , Gal Chechik , Haggai Maron

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require long-context understanding, but models continue to struggle with such tasks. We hypothesize that conventional next-token prediction training could contribute to this, because each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Falko Helm , Nico Daheim , Iryna Gurevych

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

Recent empirical evidence shows that LLM representations encode human-interpretable concepts. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which these representations emerge remain largely unexplored. To shed further light on this, we introduce a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yuhang Liu , Dong Gong , Yichao Cai , Erdun Gao , Zhen Zhang , Biwei Huang , Mingming Gong , Anton van den Hengel , Javen Qinfeng Shi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex tasks that require extended reasoning. In such settings, models often benefit from diverse chains-of-thought to arrive at multiple candidate solutions. This requires two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Xueyan Li , Guinan Su , Mrinmaya Sachan , Jonas Geiping

Optimizing training performance in large language models (LLMs) remains an essential challenge, particularly in improving model performance while maintaining computational costs. This work challenges the conventional approach of training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Chun-Hao Yang , Bo-Han Feng , Tzu-Yuan Lai , Yan Yu Chen , Yin-Kai Dean Huang , Shou-De Lin

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

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

A critical component of a successful language generation pipeline is the decoding algorithm. However, the general principles that should guide the choice of a decoding algorithm remain unclear. Previous works only compare decoding…

Large language models display remarkable capabilities in logical and mathematical reasoning, allowing them to solve complex tasks. Interestingly, these abilities emerge in networks trained on the simple task of next-token prediction. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Eran Malach

Aligning language models (LMs) to human preferences has emerged as a critical pursuit, enabling these models to better serve diverse user needs. Existing methods primarily focus on optimizing LMs for a single reward function, limiting their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Ruizhe Shi , Yifang Chen , Yushi Hu , Alisa Liu , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Noah A. Smith , Simon S. Du

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

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely employed across various application domains, yet their black-box nature poses significant challenges to understanding how these models process input data internally to make predictions. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Hangfeng He , Weijie J. Su

Web-scale pre-training datasets are the cornerstone of LLMs' success. However, text data curated from the Internet inevitably contains random noise caused by decoding errors or unregulated web content. In contrast to previous works that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Jinghan Ru , Yuxin Xie , Xianwei Zhuang , Yuguo Yin , Zhihui Guo , Zhiming Liu , Qianli Ren , Yuexian Zou

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
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