arXiv:2605.24585cs.CLq-bio.NC2026-05

用预测未来词分布的方法,让模型自发学会语法结构。

Word Class Representations Spontaneously Emerge from Successor Representations Trained on Natural Language

  • 用未来多时步词分布替代逐词预测,学习长距离语言结构
  • 在10300万词的WikiText-103上训练,无监督生成语法分类结构
  • 揭示了预测视野与语法、语义信息整合的关系,适合语言建模研究者

语言模型通常以预测下一个词为训练目标。本文探索强化学习中的替代预测原则——后继表示(Successor Representations, SRs),即建模未来状态的期望折扣分布,而非即时下一状态。将该框架引入自然语言,训练神经网络预测多个时间跨度下的未来词分布,从而学习长程转移结构表示。在包含1.03亿词、2万词汇量的WikiText-103数据集上,使用深度残差网络,通过KL散度优化SR作为概率分布。无需显式语言监督,结构化语言表示自发涌现:训练后的表示空间在词性(POS)类别上呈现清晰几何组织,名词、动词、形容词可通过无监督聚类分离并恢复。该组织随预测视野系统变化——短视野产生最强句法结构,长视野逐步融合更广上下文与语义信息。在更细粒度上,词类内部出现可解释的子结构,揭示出同类别内一致的语义亚群。结果表明,句法类别未必需显式编码,可能源于预测序列学习的自然产物。据我们所知,这是首次系统应用成功表示于自然语言,建立强化学习、语言学与认知神经科学间的概念桥梁。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Language models are typically trained to predict the next token in a sequence. Here, we explore an alternative predictive principle from reinforcement learning: Successor Representations (SRs), which model the expected discounted distribution of future states rather than the immediate next state. We transfer this framework to natural language and train neural networks to predict future word distributions across multiple temporal horizons, thereby learning representations of long-range transition structure. We train a deep residual neural network on WikiText-103 (103 million tokens; 20,000-word vocabulary) and optimize successor representations as probability distributions using KL divergence. Without explicit linguistic supervision, structured language representations emerge spontaneously. After training, the learned space develops a clear geometric organization with respect to part-of-speech (POS) categories: nouns, verbs, and adjectives become separable and recoverable through unsupervised clustering. This organization depends systematically on predictive horizon, with short horizons producing the strongest syntactic structure and longer horizons increasingly integrating broader contextual and semantic information. At finer resolutions, additional interpretable lexical substructure emerges, revealing coherent subclasses within major word categories. These findings suggest that syntactic categories need not be explicitly encoded but may arise as a consequence of predictive sequence learning. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic application of successor representations to natural language and establishes a conceptual bridge between reinforcement learning, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience.

语言模型强化学习无监督学习句法结构

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