{"id":1181843,"date":"2026-08-16T12:21:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T19:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/hierarchical-latent-prediction-for-language-models\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T11:45:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T18:45:58","slug":"hierarchical-latent-prediction-for-language-models","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/hierarchical-latent-prediction-for-language-models\/","title":{"rendered":"Hierarchical Latent Prediction for Language Models"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While standard Next-Token Prediction (NTP) lays the foundation of language model pre- training, its teacher-forced training paradigm may not be optimal for long-horizon reasoning and planning. Recent works such as Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) and Next-Latent prediction (NextLat) try to mitigate the problem through predicting multiple future tokens and self-supervised prediction in the latent space. However, those auxiliary objectives either have a limited horizon or suffer from compounding error from multi-step rollout. We introduce Hierarchical Latent Prediction (HiLP), which introduces an auxiliary higher-level abstract latent to help reduce the error accumulation effect in latent-space rollouts. Experiments show that HiLP can lead to longer-horizon coherent belief state representation and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across coding and multi-step reasoning benchmarks, and offers more speculative decoding efficiency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While standard Next-Token Prediction (NTP) lays the foundation of language model pre- training, its teacher-forced training paradigm may not be optimal for long-horizon reasoning and planning. Recent works such as Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) and Next-Latent prediction (NextLat) try to mitigate the problem through predicting multiple future tokens and self-supervised prediction in the latent space. However, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Changyan Shi","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Tim Pearce","user_id":"44054"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Manan Tomar","user_id":"43986"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Siddhartha Sen","user_id":"33656"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"John 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