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This work identifies a simple pre-training mechanism that leads to representations exhibiting better continual and transfer learning. This mechanism -- the repeated resetting of weights in the last layer, which we nickname "zapping" -- was…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Lapo Frati , Neil Traft , Jeff Clune , Nick Cheney

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

Next-token prediction serves as the dominant component in current neural language models. During the training phase, the model employs teacher forcing, which predicts tokens based on all preceding ground truth tokens. However, this approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Yongjing Yin , Junran Ding , Kai Song , Yue Zhang

Transformers have become one of the dominant architectures in deep learning, particularly as a powerful alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, Transformer training and inference in previous works…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Zizheng Pan , Bohan Zhuang , Haoyu He , Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai

Learning good representations of historical contexts is one of the core challenges of reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. While self-predictive auxiliary tasks have been shown to improve performance in fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Jeongyeol Kwon , Liu Yang , Robert Nowak , Josiah Hanna

Next-token prediction serves as the foundational learning task enabling reasoning in LLMs. But what should the learning task be when aiming to equip MLLMs with temporal reasoning capabilities over video inputs? Existing tasks such as video…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Haonan Wang , Hongfu Liu , Xiangyan Liu , Chao Du , Kenji Kawaguchi , Ye Wang , Tianyu Pang

Transformers have achieved extraordinary success in modern machine learning due to their excellent ability to handle sequential data, especially in next-token prediction (NTP) tasks. However, the theoretical understanding of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Recently, self-attention models such as Transformers have given competitive results compared to recurrent neural network systems in speech recognition. The key factor for the outstanding performance of self-attention models is their ability…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-29 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse tasks but continue to struggle with learning transitive relations, a cornerstone for complex planning. To address this issue, we investigate the Multi-Token…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Qimin Zhong , Hao Liao , Siwei Wang , Mingyang Zhou , Xiaoqun Wu , Rui Mao , Wei Chen

Domain adaptation for large neural language models (NLMs) is coupled with massive amounts of unstructured data in the pretraining phase. In this study, however, we show that pretrained NLMs learn in-domain information more effectively and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Shahriar Golchin , Mihai Surdeanu , Nazgol Tavabi , Ata Kiapour

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

LLM post-training typically propagates task gradients through the full depth of the model. Although this end-to-end structure is simple and general, it couples task adaptation to full-depth activation storage, long-range backward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hengyu Shi , Tianyang Han , Peizhe Wang , Zhiling Wang , Xu Yang , Junhao Su

Generative models are often trained with a next-token prediction objective, yet many downstream applications require the ability to estimate or control sequence-level properties. Next-token prediction can lead to overfitting of local…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Erica Stutz , Giacomo Marino , Daniella Meeker , Qiao Liu , Andrew J. Loza

Inspired by the success of generative pretraining in natural language, we ask whether the same principles can yield strong self-supervised visual learners. Instead of training models to output features for downstream use, we train them to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Sihan Xu , Ziqiao Ma , Wenhao Chai , Xuweiyi Chen , Weiyang Jin , Joyce Chai , Saining Xie , Stella X. Yu

Token prediction stability remains a challenge in autoregressive generative models, where minor variations in early inference steps often lead to significant semantic drift over extended sequences. A structured modulation mechanism was…

Next-frame prediction is a useful and powerful method for modelling and understanding the dynamics of video data. Inspired by the empirical success of causal language modelling and next-token prediction in language modelling, we explore the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Thomas Winterbottom , G. Thomas Hudson , Daniel Kluvanec , Dean Slack , Jamie Sterling , Junjie Shentu , Chenghao Xiao , Zheming Zhou , Noura Al Moubayed

Recently, the development of pre-trained language models has brought natural language processing (NLP) tasks to the new state-of-the-art. In this paper we explore the efficiency of various pre-trained language models. We pre-train a list of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Tong Guo

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jonathan Lys , Vincent Gripon , Bastien Pasdeloup , Axel Marmoret , Lukas Mauch , Fabien Cardinaux , Ghouthi Boukli Hacene

Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Xiwen Chen , Peijie Qiu , Wenhui Zhu , Huayu Li , Hao Wang , Aristeidis Sotiras , Yalin Wang , Abolfazl Razi

Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Nayoung Lee , Kartik Sreenivasan , Jason D. Lee , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos