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Related papers: Cautious Next Token Prediction

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We systematically investigate multi-token prediction (MTP) capabilities within LLMs pre-trained for next-token prediction (NTP). We first show that such models inherently possess MTP capabilities via numerical marginalization over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Somesh Mehra , Javier Alonso Garcia , Lukas Mauch

Multi-token prediction (MTP) is a prominent strategy to significantly speed up generation in large language models (LLMs), including byte-level LLMs, which are tokeniser-free but prohibitively slow. However, existing MTP methods often…

We initiate an investigation into the optimization properties of next-token prediction (NTP), the dominant training paradigm for modern language models. Specifically, we study the structural properties of the solutions selected by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Christos Thrampoulidis

While next-token prediction (NTP) has been the standard objective for training language models, it often struggles to capture global structure in reasoning tasks. Multi-token prediction (MTP) has recently emerged as a promising alternative,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jianhao Huang , Zhanpeng Zhou , Renqiu Xia , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Weijie Su , Wei Huang

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

There is a family of label modification approaches including self and non-self label correction (LC), and output regularisation. They are widely used for training robust deep neural networks (DNNs), but have not been mathematically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Xinshao Wang , Yang Hua , Elyor Kodirov , Sankha Subhra Mukherjee , David A. Clifton , Neil M. Robertson

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a range of natural language processing tasks. However, recent advances demonstrate that further gains particularly in complex reasoning tasks require more than merely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Wei Huang , Yizhe Xiong , Xin Ye , Zhijie Deng , Hui Chen , Zijia Lin , Guiguang Ding

Autoregressive decoding in language models is inherently slow, generating only one token per forward pass. We propose Parallel Token Prediction (PTP), a general-purpose framework for predicting multiple tokens in a single model call. PTP…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Felix Draxler , Justus Will , Farrin Marouf Sofian , Theofanis Karaletsos , Sameer Singh , Stephan Mandt

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

Editing Large language models (LLMs) with real-world, unstructured knowledge is essential for correcting and updating their internal parametric knowledge. In this work, we revisit the fundamental next-token prediction (NTP) as a candidate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zisheng Zhou , Mengqi Zhang , Shiguang Wu , Xiaotian Ye , Chi Zhang , Zhumin Chen , Pengjie Ren

Trending news detection in low-traffic search environments faces a fundamental cold-start problem, where a lack of query volume prevents systems from identifying emerging or long-tail trends. Existing methods relying on keyword frequency or…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Zijing Hui , Wenhan Lyu , Shusen Wang , Li Chen , Chu Wang

Probabilistic next-token prediction trained using cross-entropy loss is the basis of most large language models. Given a sequence of previous values, next-token prediction assigns a probability to each possible next value in the vocabulary.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-19 Jacob Trauger , Ambuj Tewari

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) for open-ended language generation remains a critical yet underexplored challenge, especially under black-box constraints where internal model signals are inaccessible. In this paper, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Beining Xu , Yongming Lu

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

To train robust deep neural networks (DNNs), we systematically study several target modification approaches, which include output regularisation, self and non-self label correction (LC). Two key issues are discovered: (1) Self LC is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Xinshao Wang , Yang Hua , Elyor Kodirov , David A. Clifton , Neil M. Robertson

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

Recent works have proven the effectiveness of k-nearest-neighbor machine translation(a.k.a kNN-MT) approaches to produce remarkable improvement in cross-domain translations. However, these models suffer from heavy retrieve overhead on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Xiangyu Shi , Yunlong Liang , Jinan Xu , Yufeng Chen

Recently, prompt tuning \cite{lester2021power} has gradually become a new paradigm for NLP, which only depends on the representation of the words by freezing the parameters of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to obtain remarkable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Pan He , Yuxi Chen , Yan Wang , Yanru Zhang

We introduce a simple, yet novel entropy-based framework to drive token efficiency in large language models during reasoning tasks. Our approach uses Shannon entropy from token-level logprobs as a confidence signal to enable early stopping,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Aman Sharma , Paras Chopra