LightMTP: Lightweight Latent Multi-Token Prediction

Abstract

Next-token prediction (NTP) is the standard pretraining objective for large language models, yet it provides an explicit training signal only for the immediate next token, which can lead models to exploit local patterns instead of capturing longer-range structure and ideas. Multi-token prediction (MTP) addresses this by training models to predict several future tokens. However, existing MTP methods often introduce a large number of new parameters with limited improvements in downstream performance. Latent MTP approaches address this efficiency issue by encoding future tokens into a vector representation. However, these approaches usually rely on external helper models for future token encoding. We propose LightMTP, a lightweight, i.e., parameter-efficient, latent MTP approach that bootstraps the future token representations from the model's own hidden states. Our two LightMTP variants extend supervision to more future tokens without requiring the additional computational overhead of conventional MTP nor the external supervision latent MTP normally relies on. LightMTP adds at most 1% extra parameters, retains better performance on general language modeling benchmarks, and achieves similar gains in planning, coding, and reasoning.