Training Time Comparison: Multi-Token vs. Next-Token Prediction

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8 Jun 2025

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2. Method

3. Experiments on real data

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

3.5. Training for multiple epochs and 3.6. Finetuning multi-token predictors

3.7. Multi-token prediction on natural language

4. Ablations on synthetic data and 4.1. Induction capability

4.2. Algorithmic reasoning

5. Why does it work? Some speculation and 5.1. Lookahead reinforces choice points

5.2. Information-theoretic argument

6. Related work

7. Conclusion, Impact statement, Environmental impact, Acknowledgements, and References

A. Additional results on self-speculative decoding

B. Alternative architectures

C. Training speeds

D. Finetuning

E. Additional results on model scaling behavior

F. Details on CodeContests finetuning

G. Additional results on natural language benchmarks

H. Additional results on abstractive text summarization

I. Additional results on mathematical reasoning in natural language

J. Additional results on induction learning

K. Additional results on algorithmic reasoning

L. Additional intuitions on multi-token prediction

M. Training hyperparameters

C. Training speeds

Table S5: Training time relative to next-token prediction training. The slight overhead when using multi-token prediction here is explained by a suboptimal use of Fully Sharded Data Parallel. In our implementation, when doing separate backward passes for each head, we lose the overlap of layer weight communication and computation, therefore it incurs a very slight overhead that can be removed if reimplemented correctly.

This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.

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.