解释了为何预测词语能学出通用表示,揭示其背后的几何与优化机制。
Learning Representations through Token Prediction: Geometry, Approximation, and Downstream Guarantees

- 通过海林格距离建模上下文分布相似性,指导词嵌入排列
- 重复使用同一模块可无新增参数地提升表示精度
- 理论证明预测准确率直接决定下游任务表现,适合研究模型原理者
词元预测是现代语言模型的核心预训练目标。尽管其在实践中表现优异,但为何词元预测能学习到广泛适用的表示仍不完全清楚。本文构建了一个统计框架,将词元预测与表示几何、编码器近似及下游性能联系起来。在软最大预测头下,我们证明高精度词元预测会根据不同词元出现上下文分布间的相似性(以海林格距离衡量)组织词嵌入,且误差由预测准确率和词频决定。同时,上下文表示为条件分布相对于这些嵌入的低维坐标。我们进一步提出自洽性原则,表明重复应用共享表示模块可在不增加额外参数的情况下逐步优化上下文表示。在相同预测准确率下,该递归结构偏好那些可从上下文中稳定重构的表示。最后,我们建立了词元生成、词元社区恢复和线性探测分类的下游保证,说明预测准确率与恢复的几何结构如何转化为预训练之外的表现。这些结果共同解释了简单词元预测目标如何恢复语义几何并生成通用表示。受控模拟验证了理论机制。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Token prediction is a central pre-training objective for modern language models. Despite its empirical success, why token prediction learns broadly useful representations remains incompletely understood. We develop a statistical framework connecting token prediction with representation geometry, encoder approximation, and downstream performance. Under a softmax prediction head, we show that accurate token prediction organizes token embeddings according to similarities between the distributions of contexts in which different token types appear, as measured by Hellinger distance, with explicit errors governed by prediction accuracy and token frequency. Meanwhile, the contextual representation provides a low-dimensional coordinate for the conditional distribution of the target token relative to these embeddings. We further introduce a self-consistency principle showing that repeated applications of a shared representation block can progressively refine the contextual representation without introducing additional block parameters. Among representations with the same prediction accuracy, this recurrent construction favors those that can be stably reconstructed from their contexts. Finally, we establish downstream guarantees for token generation, token community recovery, and classification by a linear probe, showing how prediction accuracy and recovered geometry translate into performance beyond the pre-training objective. Together, these results explain how the simple objective of predicting tokens can recover semantic geometry and produce broadly useful representations. A controlled simulation illustrates the theoretical mechanisms.
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