When Is Next-Token Prediction Useful? Marginalization, Ergodicity, Mixture Identifiability, Local Sufficiency, RAG, Tools, and Programming 文章

arXiv:2605.23278v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models trained on observed sequences are often described as learning the conditional distribution of the next token given previous tokens. This description is only conditionally correct. A model trained on realized token trajectories does not observe full conditional laws; it receives sampled continuations. Moreover, real language generation is conditioned not only on previous words but also on non-textual circumstances: facts, events, intentions, goals, beliefs, social context, and task-specific constraints. This paper distinguishes three objects that are often conflated: the full conditional language process conditioned on latent circumstances, the marginal text-only process obtained by integrating those circumstances out, and the model-induced distribution learned from finite observed corpora.