Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction Abstract and 1. Introduction 2. Method 2. Method 3. Experiments on real data 3. Experiments on real data 4. Ablations on synthetic data 4. Ablations on synthetic data 5. Why does it work? Some speculation 5. Why does it work? Some speculation 6. Related work 6. Related work 7. Conclusion, Impact statement, Environmental impact, Acknowledgements and References 7. Conclusion, Impact statement, Environmental impact, Acknowledgements and References A. Additional results on self-speculative decoding A. Additional results on self-speculative decoding B. Alternative architectures B. Alternative architectures C. Training speeds C. Training speeds D. Finetuning D. Finetuning E. Additional results on model scaling behavior E. Additional results on model scaling behavior F. Details on CodeContests finetuning F. Details on CodeContests finetuning G. Additional results on natural language benchmarks G. Additional results on natural language benchmarks H. Additional results on abstractive text summarization H. Additional results on abstractive text summarization I. Additional results on mathematical reasoning in natural language I. Additional results on mathematical reasoning in natural language J. Additional results on induction learning J. Additional results on induction learning K. Additional results on algorithmic reasoning K. Additional results on algorithmic reasoning L. Additional intuitions on multi-token prediction L. Additional intuitions on multi-token prediction M. Training hyperparameters M. Training hyperparameters 5. Why does it work? Some speculation Why does multi-token prediction afford superior performance on coding evaluation benchmarks, and on small algorithmic reasoning tasks? Our intuition, developed in this section, is that multi-token prediction mitigates the distributional discrepancy between training-time teacher forcing and inference-time autoregressive generation. We support this view with an illustrative argument on the implicit weights multi-token prediction assigns to tokens depending on their relevance for the continuation of the text, as well as with an information-theoretic decomposition of multi-token prediction loss. 5.1. Lookahead reinforces choice points Not all token decisions are equally important for generating useful texts from language models (Bachmann and Nagarajan, 2024; Lin et al., 2024). While some tokens allow stylistic variations that do not constrain the remainder of the text, others represent choice points that are linked with higher-level semantic properties of the text and may decide whether an answer is perceived as useful or derailing. derailing 5.2. Information-theoretic argument Language models are typically trained by teacher-forcing, where the model receives the ground truth for each future token during training. However, during test time generation is unguided and autoregressive, whereby errors accumulate. Teacher-forcing, we argue, encourages models to focus on predicting well in the very short term, at the potential expense of ignoring longer-term dependencies in the overall structure of the generated sequence. To illustrate the impact of multi-token prediction, consider the following information-theoretic argument. Here, X denotes the next future token, and Y the second-next future token. The production of both of these tokens is conditioned on some observed, input context C, that we omit from our equations for simplicity. When placed before token X, vanilla next-token prediction concerns the quantity H(X), while multi-token prediction with n = 2 aims at H(X) + H(Y). We decompose these two quantities as: By discarding the term H(Y | X)—which appears again when predicting at the following position—we observe that 2-token prediction increases the importance of I(X; Y ) by a factor of 2. So, multi-token predictors are more accurate at predicting tokens X that are of relevance for the remainder of the text to come. In Appendix L.2, we give a relative version of the above equations that shows the increased weight of relative mutual information in a loss decomposition of 2-token prediction loss. Authors:
(1) Fabian Gloeckle, FAIR at Meta, CERMICS Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and Equal contribution;
(2) Badr Youbi Idrissi, FAIR at Meta, LISN Université Paris-Saclayand  and Equal contribution;
(3) Baptiste Rozière, FAIR at Meta;
(4) David Lopez-Paz, FAIR at Meta and a last author;
(5) Gabriel Synnaeve, FAIR at Meta and a last author. Authors: Authors: (1) Fabian Gloeckle, FAIR at Meta, CERMICS Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and Equal contribution; (2) Badr Youbi Idrissi, FAIR at Meta, LISN Université Paris-Saclayand  and Equal contribution; (3) Baptiste Rozière, FAIR at Meta; (4) David Lopez-Paz, FAIR at Meta and a last author; (5) Gabriel Synnaeve, FAIR at Meta and a last author. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv available on arxiv

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