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

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How can small-scale large language models (LLMs) efficiently utilize the supervision of LLMs to improve their generative quality? This question has been well studied in scenarios where there is no restriction on the number of LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Hyunjong Ok , Jegwang Ryu , Jaeho Lee

Autoregressive neural language models (LMs) generate a probability distribution over tokens at each time step given a prompt. In this work, we attempt to systematically understand the probability distributions that LMs can produce, showing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Haojin Wang , Zining Zhu , Freda Shi

One of the most striking findings in modern research on large language models (LLMs) is that scaling up compute during training leads to better results. However, less attention has been given to the benefits of scaling compute during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Sean Welleck , Amanda Bertsch , Matthew Finlayson , Hailey Schoelkopf , Alex Xie , Graham Neubig , Ilia Kulikov , Zaid Harchaoui

Language model (LM) decoding is based on the next-token prediction (NTP) probability distribution. For neural LMs (e.g., Transformer-based), NTP distribution is essentially a softmax-regularized dot product between an encoded input context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Letian Peng , Chenyang An , Jingbo Shang

Despite strong performance on a variety of tasks, neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood have been shown to exhibit issues such as length bias and degenerate repetition. We study the related issue of receiving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Sean Welleck , Ilia Kulikov , Jaedeok Kim , Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Kyunghyun Cho

Recent advances in natural language processing highlight two key factors for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs): (i) allocating more test-time compute tends to help on harder problems but often introduces redundancy in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Riccardo Alberghi , Elizaveta Demyanenko , Luca Biggio , Luca Saglietti

Advances in hardware and language model architecture have spurred a revolution in natural language generation. However, autoregressive models compute probability distributions over next-token choices, and sampling from these distributions,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Tom Kempton , Stuart Burrell

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

Often, the performance on a supervised machine learning task is evaluated with a emph{task loss} function that cannot be optimized directly. Examples of such loss functions include the classification error, the edit distance and the BLEU…

Decoding methods play an indispensable role in converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. Prior research on decoding methods, primarily focusing on task-specific models, may not extend to the current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Chufan Shi , Haoran Yang , Deng Cai , Zhisong Zhang , Yifan Wang , Yujiu Yang , Wai Lam

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…

Language models have recently been shown capable of performing regression wherein numeric predictions are represented as decoded strings. In this work, we provide theoretical grounds for this capability and furthermore investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Xingyou Song , Dara Bahri

Despite their growing capabilities, language models still frequently reproduce content from their training data, generate repetitive text, and favor common grammatical patterns and vocabulary. A possible cause is the decoding strategy: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Giorgio Franceschelli , Mirco Musolesi

Decoding strategies play a central role in shaping the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Traditional methods such as greedy decoding and beam search often suffer from error propagation, while sampling-based approaches…

Language models (LMs) are trained on billions of tokens in an attempt to recover the true language distribution. Still, vanilla random sampling from LMs yields low quality generations. Decoding algorithms attempt to restrict the LM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Kareem Ahmed , Sameer Singh

In-context learning has established itself as an important learning paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs can learn encoding keys in-context and perform analysis directly on encoded…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Andresa Rodrigues de Campos , David Lee , Imry Kissos , Piyush Paritosh

We propose a new model for multi-token prediction in transformers, aiming to enhance sampling efficiency without compromising accuracy. Motivated by recent work that predicts the probabilities of subsequent tokens using multiple heads, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Artem Basharin , Andrei Chertkov , Ivan Oseledets

The execution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been shown to produce nondeterministic results when run on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), even when they are configured to produce deterministic results. This is due to the finite…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tairan Fu , Gonzalo Martínez , Javier Conde , Carlos Arriaga , Pedro Reviriego , Xiuyuan Qi , Shanshan Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks. However, current training approaches combine standard cross-entropy loss with extensive data, human feedback, or ad hoc methods to enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Daniele Rege Cambrin , Giuseppe Gallipoli , Irene Benedetto , Luca Cagliero , Paolo Garza

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