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 3.1. Benefits scale with model size and 3.2. Faster inference 3.1. Benefits scale with model size and 3.2. Faster inference 3.3. Learning global patterns with multi-byte prediction and 3.4. Searching for the optimal n 3.3. Learning global patterns with multi-byte prediction and 3.4. Searching for the optimal n n 3.5. Training for multiple epochs and 3.6. Finetuning multi-token predictors 3.5. Training for multiple epochs and 3.6. Finetuning multi-token predictors 3.7. Multi-token prediction on natural language 3.7. Multi-token prediction on natural language 4. Ablations on synthetic data and 4.1. Induction capability 4. Ablations on synthetic data and 4.1. Induction capability 4.2. Algorithmic reasoning 4.2. Algorithmic reasoning 5. Why does it work? Some speculation and 5.1. Lookahead reinforces choice points 5. Why does it work? Some speculation and 5.1. Lookahead reinforces choice points 5.2. Information-theoretic argument 5.2. Information-theoretic argument 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 5.2. 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: H(X) = H(X | Y ) + I(X; Y ), H(X) = H(X | Y ) + I(X; Y ), H(X) + H(Y ) = H(X | Y ) + 2I(X; Y ) + H(Y | X). H(X) + H(Y ) = H(X | Y ) + 2I(X; Y ) + H(Y | X). 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. 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 Authors:
(1) Fabian Gloeckle, FAIR at Meta, CERMICS Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, and contributed equally;
(2) Badr Youbi IdrissiFAIR at Meta, LISN Université Paris-Saclay, and contributed equally;
(3) Baptiste Rozière, FAIR at Meta;
(4) David Lopez-Paz, FAIR at Meta and his the last author;
(5) Gabriel Synnaeve, FAIR at Meta and the last author. Authors: Authors: (1) Fabian Gloeckle, FAIR at Meta, CERMICS Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, and contributed equally; (2) Badr Youbi IdrissiFAIR at Meta, LISN Université Paris-Saclay, and contributed equally; (3) Baptiste Rozière, FAIR at Meta; (4) David Lopez-Paz, FAIR at Meta and his the last author; (5) Gabriel Synnaeve, FAIR at Meta and the last author.

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