LightMTP: Lightweight Latent Multi-Token Prediction
Organizations: Hasso Plattner Institute / University of Potsdam · Stanford University · Tel-Aviv University
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.
Figures & tables
| Method | FineWeb-Edu (PPL) | Lambada (PPL) | Lambada (Acc) | CORE-avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NTP | 1.683 ±0.001 | 16.00 ±0.72 | 43.59 ±0.85 | 40.43 ±0.68 |
| Meta | 1.712 ±0.003 | 18.66 ±0.84 | 42.14 ±0.91 | 39.31 ±0.69 |
| Meta-L | 1.698 ±0.001 | 18.13 ±0.48 | 42.84 ±0.70 | 39.89 ±0.42 |
| DeepSeek | 1.762 ±0.038 | 31.49 ±11.42 | 35.68 ±4.28 | 35.81 ±2.60 |
| Future Summaries | 1.685 ±0.002 | 15.57 ±0.33 | 44.43 ±0.45 | 40.25 ±0.37 |
| LightMTP-C | 1.683 ±0.000 | 16.35 ±0.20 | 43.22 ±0.42 | 40.30 ±0.23 |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Architecture (d24) | |
|---|---|
| Layers / width / heads | 24 / 1536 / 12 (head dim. 128, no GQA) |
| MLP | (6,144), ReLU 2 , no biases |
| Normalization | parameter-free RMSNorm (pre-norm, embedding, final, QK) |
| Position encoding | RoPE, base |
| Attention windows | SSSL pattern (S = 1,024, L = 2,048 tokens), last layer L |
| Context length | 2,048 |
| Model | Total | Scaling | Non-scaling | MTP head | params | Tokens | Steps | H100 GPU-h |
| d12 | ||||||||
| NTP | 286.3M | 110.1M | 176.2M | — | — | 1.32B | 2 520 | 0.7 |
| Meta-L ‡ | 361.8M | 185.6M | 176.2M | 75.5M | +26.4% | 2.23B | 4 248 | 2.0 |
| Meta | 307.5M | 131.3M | 176.2M | 21.2M | +7.4% | 1.58B | 3 006 | 1.6 |
| DeepSeek MTP | 311.0M | 134.9M | 176.2M | 24.8M | +8.7% | 1.62B | 3 087 | 1.6 |
| Future Summaries | 287.4M(+286.3M) | 111.3M | 176.2M | 1.2M | +0.4% | 1.34B | 2 547 | 0.9 |
| NTP | Meta | Meta-L | Future Summaries | LightMTP-C | LightMTP-S | |
| Over all completions | ||||||
| parses as Python | 96.00 1.11 | 96.44 1.16 | 96.07 1.01 | 95.33 1.49 | 96.41 1.43 | 95.70 0.17 |
| solved | 4.07 0.56 | 4.48 1.12 | 6.37 0.17 | 5.44 0.97 | 5.70 0.53 | 4.00 0.29 |
| Structural failures (% of failing completions) | ||||||
| NameError | 8.27 3.66 | 7.93 2.37 | 7.16 0.44 | 5.21 0.37 | 6.36 1.11 | 5.90 1.41 |
| SyntaxError | 4.13 0.99 | 3.68 0.59 | 3.72 0.65 | 4.61 1.34 | 3.66 1.29 | 4.20 1.53 |
| World Knowledge | Commonsense | Passage Comprehension | Symbolic reasoning | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Method | jeopardy | bb-qa-wikidata | arc-easy | arc-challenge | openbook-qa | bb-language-identification | copa | commonsense-qa | piqa | hellaswag | hellaswag-zeroshot | winograd | winogrande | squad | coqa | boolq | lambada-openai | bb-dyck-languages | bb-cs-algorithms | bb-repeat-copy-logic | bb-operators | lsat-ar | CORE avg | MMLU (ICL) | GSM8K (p@5) | GSM8K (strict) | Lambada (PPL) |
| Baseline | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| NTP | 18.61 1.36 | 51.60 0.79 | 66.44 1.13 | 37.30 0.88 | 37.96 1.01 | 25.42 0.42 | 66.80 1.10 | 28.70 6.61 | 71.58 0.28 | 51.27 0.36 | 51.11 0.31 | 69.60 1.55 | 56.76 0.97 | 35.89 1.26 | 25.79 1.10 | 52.97 6.59 | 43.49 0.87 | 10.86 0.96 | 40.44 3.65 | 3.12 0.00 | 17.81 1.92 | 25.91 2.45 | 40.43 0.68 | 24.97 0.49 | 41.97 2.29 | 4.94 1.44 | 16.00 0.72 |
| Concat-targets (target layer 16) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Concat | 17.89 0.80 | 52.86 0.53 | 67.21 0.53 | 37.63 0.15 | 39.87 1.33 | 25.18 0.56 | 67.67 2.31 | 28.31 0.74 | 71.11 0.29 | 51.29 0.39 | 50.85 0.32 | 67.77 0.73 | 55.80 1.10 | 35.12 1.11 | 26.59 1.18 | 46.97 4.96 | 43.11 0.57 | 11.40 2.05 | 39.80 2.77 | 2.08 3.61 | 17.14 0.95 | 27.83 1.15 | 40.16 0.38 | 24.37 0.55 | 42.53 1.91 | 4.60 0.24 | 16.60 0.09 |
| Concat | 16.97 2.10 | 51.90 0.59 | 65.80 0.49 | 36.58 0.64 | 38.60 0.20 | 25.19 0.74 | 67.33 2.89 | 23.31 3.44 | 70.62 1.23 | 50.52 1.37 | 50.11 1.24 | 67.28 2.44 | 56.35 1.16 | 35.46 1.67 | 25.98 0.18 | 51.06 4.71 | 43.21 0.52 | 10.30 2.76 | 41.39 3.43 | 5.21 1.80 | 17.62 1.26 | 27.10 2.39 | 39.90 0.45 | 24.41 0.19 | 42.66 2.08 | 5.10 1.51 | 16.92 0.81 |
| World Knowledge | Commonsense | Passage Comprehension | Symbolic reasoning | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Method | jeopardy | bb-qa-wikidata | arc-easy | arc-challenge | openbook-qa | bb-language-identification | copa | commonsense-qa | piqa | hellaswag | hellaswag-zeroshot | winograd | winogrande | squad | coqa | boolq | lambada-openai | bb-dyck-languages | bb-cs-algorithms | bb-repeat-copy-logic | bb-operators | lsat-ar | CORE avg | MMLU (ICL) | GSM8K (p@5) | GSM8K (strict) | Lambada (PPL) |
| Baselines | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| NTP | 18.61 1.36 | 51.60 0.79 | 66.44 1.13 | 37.30 0.88 | 37.96 1.01 | 25.42 0.42 | 66.80 1.10 | 28.70 6.61 | 71.58 0.28 | 51.27 0.36 | 51.11 0.31 | 69.60 1.55 | 56.76 0.97 | 35.89 1.26 | 25.79 1.10 | 52.97 6.59 | 43.49 0.87 | 10.86 0.96 | 40.44 3.65 | 3.12 0.00 | 17.81 1.92 | 25.91 2.45 | 40.43 0.68 | 24.97 0.49 | 41.97 2.29 | 4.94 1.44 | 16.00 0.72 |
| Meta | 14.49 1.62 | 49.84 0.89 | 64.49 0.36 | 34.95 0.49 | 37.67 0.92 | 24.88 0.25 | 68.00 1.00 | 22.88 2.74 | 70.18 0.36 | 48.50 0.72 | 48.24 0.60 | 66.06 0.76 | 56.01 1.34 | 35.19 1.68 | 26.13 1.00 | 59.06 3.60 | 42.12 0.86 | 12.27 1.01 | 39.32 1.51 | 3.12 3.12 | 18.25 0.99 | 23.19 3.29 | 39.31 0.69 | 24.65 0.97 | 41.45 1.43 | 4.09 0.08 | 18.66 0.84 |
| Meta-L | 18.76 0.95 | 50.69 0.58 | 65.76 0.29 | 37.30 0.83 | 38.48 0.86 | 24.89 0.26 | 67.20 2.17 | 26.22 2.31 | 70.95 0.58 | 51.02 0.20 | 50.79 0.29 | 67.69 1.11 | 56.56 1.67 | 38.53 0.68 | 28.16 0.37 | 45.22 6.03 | 42.80 0.68 | 11.38 0.82 | 37.14 2.95 | 5.62 1.40 | 18.00 1.23 | 24.43 2.77 | 39.89 0.42 | 24.54 0.25 | 41.91 0.88 | 4.82 1.19 | 18.13 0.48 |
| DeepSeek MTP | 6.15 4.58 | 43.79 5.14 | 59.78 3.76 | 30.49 2.62 | 33.76 2.04 | 25.03 0.39 | 63.20 2.77 | 28.68 4.94 | 67.52 1.43 | 41.48 4.25 | 41.73 4.21 | 62.34 3.45 | 52.64 1.78 | 21.98 11.46 | 19.71 4.66 | 57.86 3.32 | 35.77 4.33 | 11.62 2.64 | 39.12 1.55 | 1.25 1.71 | 14.57 3.98 | 29.30 1.52 | 35.81 2.60 | 25.14 0.48 | 39.17 2.11 | 3.85 0.68 | 31.49 11.42 |
| World Knowledge | Commonsense | Passage Comprehension | Symbolic reasoning | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Method | jeopardy | bb-qa-wikidata | arc-easy | arc-challenge | openbook-qa | bb-language-identification | copa | commonsense-qa | piqa | hellaswag | hellaswag-zeroshot | winograd | winogrande | squad | coqa | boolq | lambada-openai | bb-dyck-languages | bb-cs-algorithms | bb-repeat-copy-logic | bb-operators | lsat-ar | CORE avg | MMLU (ICL) | GSM8K (p@5) | GSM8K (strict) | Lambada (PPL) |
| Baselines | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| NTP | 4.11 2.27 | 44.14 1.95 | 59.83 0.53 | 32.05 0.74 | 34.93 1.10 | 25.40 0.34 | 64.00 0.00 | 29.59 3.79 | 67.03 0.09 | 41.47 0.57 | 41.77 0.42 | 61.54 2.29 | 53.09 1.51 | 23.64 1.90 | 19.66 1.07 | 57.43 2.69 | 36.10 1.22 | 11.97 1.44 | 41.26 1.87 | 2.08 1.80 | 15.71 0.48 | 26.09 2.17 | 36.04 0.25 | 24.32 0.60 | 38.46 1.45 | 4.12 0.65 | 27.85 1.20 |
| Meta | 5.94 1.38 | 43.98 0.53 | 59.30 0.36 | 29.10 1.02 | 34.87 1.47 | 24.91 0.36 | 64.67 0.58 | 26.73 5.17 | 67.10 0.03 | 41.29 0.23 | 41.27 0.21 | 63.74 2.29 | 53.75 0.16 | 26.53 0.30 | 21.68 0.21 | 53.43 2.80 | 36.57 1.23 | 12.03 0.45 | 41.69 2.39 | 1.04 1.80 | 16.35 0.27 | 24.20 3.75 | 35.92 0.17 | 24.14 0.65 | 39.55 3.83 | 4.32 0.66 | 29.26 2.29 |
| Meta-L | 6.69 0.91 | 43.16 0.71 | 59.64 0.99 | 31.14 0.68 | 35.33 1.10 | 25.01 0.52 | 63.00 3.00 | 23.40 2.53 | 66.85 0.28 | 42.20 0.31 | 42.23 0.51 | 62.27 1.68 | 54.88 1.35 | 24.01 1.48 | 21.02 1.44 | 51.80 2.46 | 36.35 0.32 | 9.60 1.71 | 37.30 2.18 | 2.08 1.80 | 14.44 2.40 | 24.35 3.56 | 35.31 0.14 | 24.30 0.26 | 38.62 1.61 | 3.74 0.09 | 29.21 0.86 |
| DeepSeek MTP | 1.45 0.88 | 35.31 3.22 | 53.58 1.39 | 27.13 1.20 | 31.27 1.67 | 25.37 0.41 | 60.33 2.08 | 27.27 2.68 | 64.35 0.69 | 33.53 1.20 | 33.67 1.12 | 59.34 0.97 | 52.14 0.92 | 11.56 3.64 | 13.05 1.21 | 54.86 8.45 | 27.41 1.45 | 11.97 3.95 | 41.09 0.38 | 2.08 1.80 | 12.70 4.05 | 24.64 1.26 | 32.00 0.80 | 24.21 0.52 | 36.95 2.07 | 3.06 0.61 | 67.80 10.47 |