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Auteurs principaux: Peng, Bowen, Gigant, Théo, Quesnelle, Jeffrey
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06546
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author Peng, Bowen
Gigant, Théo
Quesnelle, Jeffrey
author_facet Peng, Bowen
Gigant, Théo
Quesnelle, Jeffrey
contents Pre-training of Large Language Models is often prohibitively expensive and inefficient at scale, requiring complex and invasive modifications in order to achieve high data throughput. In this work, we present Token-Superposition Training (TST), a simple drop-in method that significantly improves the data throughput per FLOPs during pre-training without modifying the parallelism, optimizer, tokenizer, data, or model architecture. TST is done in two phases: (i) A highly efficient superposition phase where we combine many contiguous tokens into one bag and train using a multi-hot cross-entropy (MCE) objective, and (ii) a recovery phase where we revert back to standard training. We extensively evaluate TST on the scale of 270M and 600M parameters and validate on 3B and a 10B A1B mixture of experts model, demonstrating that it is highly robust in different settings. Ultimately, TST consistently outperforms baseline loss and downstream evaluations, and under equal-loss settings, TST yields up to a 2.5x reduction in total pre-training time at the 10B A1B scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06546
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Pre-Training with Token Superposition
Peng, Bowen
Gigant, Théo
Quesnelle, Jeffrey
Computation and Language
Pre-training of Large Language Models is often prohibitively expensive and inefficient at scale, requiring complex and invasive modifications in order to achieve high data throughput. In this work, we present Token-Superposition Training (TST), a simple drop-in method that significantly improves the data throughput per FLOPs during pre-training without modifying the parallelism, optimizer, tokenizer, data, or model architecture. TST is done in two phases: (i) A highly efficient superposition phase where we combine many contiguous tokens into one bag and train using a multi-hot cross-entropy (MCE) objective, and (ii) a recovery phase where we revert back to standard training. We extensively evaluate TST on the scale of 270M and 600M parameters and validate on 3B and a 10B A1B mixture of experts model, demonstrating that it is highly robust in different settings. Ultimately, TST consistently outperforms baseline loss and downstream evaluations, and under equal-loss settings, TST yields up to a 2.5x reduction in total pre-training time at the 10B A1B scale.
title Efficient Pre-Training with Token Superposition
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06546