The AI community has framed the relationship between large language models (LLMs) and world models as a dichotomy: LLMs predict tokens; world models simulate reality. Yann LeCun argues in 2022 that reaching general intelligence requires abandoning autoregressive token prediction in favour of latent-space architectures.
arXiv:2511. 05963v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc lookups over past tokens.
By Jayden Teoh, Manan Tomar, Kwangjun Ahn, Edward S. Hu, Tim Pearce, Pratyusha Sharma, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Riashat Islam, Alex Lamb, John Langford
arXiv:2606. 09936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models are now built on substantially different computational substrates.
By Bhavith Chandra Challagundla, Sanskar Pandey, Param Thakkar, Rishikesh Mallagundla, Yugandhar Reddy Gogireddy, Wenhao Lu, Hindol Roy Choudhury, Shravani Challagundla, Mohamed Deraz Nasr, Spursh Deshpande
arXiv:2609.38806v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Next-token prediction has driven remarkable progress in large language models, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that they can struggle on prob...
By Woosang Jeon, Jaeyeon Kim, Sham Kakade, Yilun Du, Amrit Singh Bedi, Arun Kumar Chithanar, Chul Lee, Taehyeong Kim, Sitan Chen
The paper introduces the AGI Maze Prediction Datasets and Benchmark, a lightweight, procedurally generated grid‑world testbed for evaluating predictive models, particularly Transformers, on tasks such as per‑step transition prediction, fixed‑horizon state prediction, and sequential textual‑observation prediction. It compares byte‑level Transformer baselines with two memory‑augmented architectures, showing that a pseudo‑video spatial‑memory Transformer achieves perfect validation accuracy on selected tasks and improves sequential text‑trace prediction, while a generic auxiliary latent‑memory Transformer does not consistently help. The study highlights that structured, task‑aligned working memory can be more effective than merely increasing latent capacity, and positions the benchmark as a compact setting for testing architectures that couple textual interfaces to learned structured state.
By Alexey Potapov
NCP-ArchPreview is a latent‑space language model that extends standard next‑token prediction (NTP) with a Next Concept Prediction (NCP) objective, allowing the model to predict discrete concepts spanning multiple tokens. The architecture builds a product‑quantized concept vocabulary from hidden states, uses a dedicated Concept Module to forecast future concepts, and feeds these predictions back to guide token‑level generation, all trained jointly end‑to‑end. Trained on 5.73 T tokens with 8.9 B parameters, it achieves the final pretraining loss of OLMo‑3‑7B using only 51.3 % of the tokens, outperforms OLMo‑3‑7B on downstream tasks (including a 5.99‑point GSM8K gain), and demonstrates that the learned latent space enables lightweight domain adaptation and improved drafting performance.
By NCP Team, Jiaqi Cao, Chiyu Chen, Shuang Cheng, Xu Cheng, Beiya Dai, Yufan Feng, Kewen Ge, Ruijun Ge, Jiayi Huang, Yang Jiao, Dahua Lin, Zhouhan Lin, Yifan Liu, Yuliang Liu, Biqing Qi, Mowen Ruan, Junzhe Shen, Yunchong Song, Hao Sun, Zhongbo Tian, Yixuan Wang, Rubin Wei, Jiaxin Xiong, Kangyu Yang, Qian Yao, Qi Zhang, Bowen Zhou