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.
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.
By Shulei Wang
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...
By Junjie Yao, Liangkai Hang, Zhi-Qin John Xu
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.
By Kanishk Jain, Matthew Day, Tankut Can
The paper investigates whether few-shot in-context learning (ICL) emerges similarly across different data modalities. Using a controlled cross-modality framework, the authors test the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis, which posits that tasks benefiting from ICL in one modality will also benefit in others. They find that paired-mapping ICL appears in six modalities—language, genome, integer sequences, time series, images, and proteins—outperforming baselines and showing correlated task effects in five of them, supporting the hypothesis in some but not all cases.
By Nathan Breslow, Seungwook Han, Daniel Hyunsoo Lee, Aayush Mishra, Anqi Liu, Daniel Khashabi
arXiv:2507. 01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall.
By Sultan Daniels, Dylan Davis, Dhruv Gautam, Wentinn Liao, Gireeja Ranade, Anant Sahai