The paper investigates why token prediction, a common pre‑training objective for language models, yields useful representations. It introduces a statistical framework linking token prediction accuracy to the geometry of token embeddings, showing that accurate predictions organize embeddings according to Hellinger distances between context distributions. The authors also propose a self‑consistency principle that refines contextual representations through repeated application of a shared block, and provide downstream guarantees for token generation, community recovery, and linear classification.
arXiv:2608.30315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Token embeddings are the basic representational units that connect discrete tokens with continuous computation in language models. Although modern lang...
The paper examines how new vocabulary tokens are added to language models for generative recommendation tasks. It shows that the common practice of initializing these tokens as the mean of existing embeddings collapses them into a degenerate subspace, hindering fine‑tuning. The authors propose Grounded Token Initialization (GTI), which places new tokens at semantically meaningful positions in the pretrained embedding space using linguistic supervision, and demonstrate that GTI outperforms mean initialization and other adaptation methods across several benchmarks.
arXiv:2606. 05173v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked language modelling (MLM) has been the dominant pre-training objective for text encoders since BERT, yet it encourages representations that are strongly anchored to surface-form token identity rather than deeper semantic structure.
Neural Collapse predicts that balanced one-hot classification pushes model representations to be equally far from each other; a symmetric configuration that depends only on the output label and ignores any semantic similarity in the inputs. This creates a puzzle: next-token prediction language models are trained predominantly (as context length increases) with one-hot labels: the same context is very unlikely to appear twice in training with different labels.
arXiv:2606. 26749v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Collapse predicts that balanced one-hot classification pushes model representations to be equally far from each other; a symmetric configuration that depends only on the output label and ignores any semantic similarity in the inputs.
arXiv:2608.23551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in continuous diffusion and flow-based language models (LMs) have achieved performance competitive with discrete LMs. However, existi...
arXiv:2607. 17524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task.
arXiv:2605. 28854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility in adapting to novel tasks from in-context examples without parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL).
arXiv:2608. 19529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many real-world AI systems represent entities, behaviors, and structured information using discrete machine-native symbols rather than natural language.
We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task. Our key intuition is that by training the model to distinguish good and bad tokens in a response, we naturally guide the model towards generating good tokens, while avoiding the pitfalls that come with directly training the model to generate off-policy tokens.
arXiv:2606. 15521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string.
arXiv:2608. 16269v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in neural topic models with pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved strong performance by leveraging general-domain pre-training, yet their topic interpretability often degrades on specialized corpora.