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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

Since the inception of Large Language Models (LLMs), the quest to efficiently train them for superior reasoning capabilities has been a pivotal challenge. The dominant training paradigm for LLMs is based on next token prediction (NTP).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Pengxiao Lin , Zhongwang Zhang , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable progress. Despite their success, next-token prediction (NTP), the dominant method for LLM training and inference, is constrained in both contextual coverage and inference efficiency due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xiaohao Liu , Xiaobo Xia , Weixiang Zhao , Manyi Zhang , Xianzhi Yu , Xiu Su , Shuo Yang , See-Kiong Ng , Tat-Seng Chua

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…

We propose Next Concept Prediction (NCP), a generative pretraining paradigm built on top of Next Token Prediction (NTP). NCP predicts discrete concepts that span multiple tokens, thereby forming a more challenging pretraining objective. Our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yuliang Liu , Yunchong Song , Yixuan Wang , Kewen Ge , Alex Lamb , Qipeng Guo , Kai Chen , Bowen Zhou , Zhouhan Lin

Multi-token prediction (MTP) is a recently proposed pre-training objective for language models. Rather than predicting only the next token (NTP), MTP predicts the next $k$ tokens at each prediction step, using multiple prediction heads. MTP…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Ansar Aynetdinov , Alan Akbik

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

The paradigm of Next Token Prediction (NTP) has driven the unprecedented success of Large Language Models (LLMs), but is also the source of their most persistent weaknesses such as poor long-term planning, error accumulation, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Charlie Wyatt , Aditya Joshi , Flora Salim

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

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

Whether Large Language Models (LLMs) develop coherent internal world models remains a core debate. While conventional Next-Token Prediction (NTP) focuses on one-step-ahead supervision, Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) has shown promise in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Qimin Zhong , Hao Liao , Haiming Qin , Mingyang Zhou , Rui Mao , Wei Chen , Naipeng Chao

Concepts play a pivotal role in various human cognitive functions, including learning, reasoning and communication. However, there is very little work on endowing machines with the ability to form and reason with concepts. In particular,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Chen Shani , Jilles Vreeken , Dafna Shahaf

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

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

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been prevailing in state-of-the-art methods for natural language processing, and knowledge-enhanced PLMs are further proposed to promote model performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Xintao Wang , Zhouhong Gu , Jiaqing Liang , Dakuan Lu , Yanghua Xiao , Wei Wang

Pre-trained language models (PTLM) have achieved impressive results in a range of natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks. However, current pre-training objectives such as masked token prediction (for BERT-style…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Wangchunshu Zhou , Dong-Ho Lee , Ravi Kiran Selvam , Seyeon Lee , Bill Yuchen Lin , Xiang Ren

Next-token prediction (NTP) has driven the success of large language models (LLMs), but it struggles with long-horizon reasoning, planning, and creative writing, with these limitations largely attributed to teacher-forced training.…

Large language models (LLMs) have become the cornerstone of modern AI. However, the existing paradigm of next-token prediction fundamentally limits their ability to form coherent, high-level concepts, making it a critical barrier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Michael K. Chen , Xikun Zhang , Jiaxing Huang , Dacheng Tao

We propose ContextLM, a framework that implicitly learns multi-token prediction by augmenting standard pretraining with an intrinsic next-context prediction objective. ContextLM builds a language model on top of context embeddings that span…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Beiya Dai , Yuliang Liu , Daozheng Xue , Yunchong Song , Qipeng Guo , Kai Chen , Xinbing Wang , Bowen Zhou , Zhouhan Lin

Standard next-token prediction (NTP) supervises language models solely through discrete labels in the output logit space. We argue that this sparse one-hot supervision leaves the latent representation space under-constrained, allowing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xiangdong Zhang , Debing Zhang , Shaofeng Zhang , Xiaohan Qin , Yu Cheng , Junchi Yan
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