Zili Wang
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2026
Joint Training of Multi-Token Prediction in Reinforcement Learning via Optimal Coefficient Calibration
Zili Wang | Jiajun Chai | Lin Chen | Xiaohan Wang | Shiming Xiang | Guojun Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zili Wang | Jiajun Chai | Lin Chen | Xiaohan Wang | Shiming Xiang | Guojun Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as the standard paradigm for improving reasoning capability of large language models, while Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) has been a widely adopted module in pretraining. Combining the two is a natural approach, yet current RL practices detach MTP gradients because joint training degrades the performance. We revisit this failure from an optimization perspective. We show that the per-step effect of MTP on the RL objective can be decomposed into two terms: a first-order correlation and a second-order perturbation penalty. This decomposition unifies three MTP training regimes: Detach, Cross-Entropy loss, and Policy loss, and explains why each succeeds or fails. Further analysis of policy loss reveals that, although it aligns with intuition, performance still degrades: the correlation term decays while the quadratic penalty persists. Guided by the analysis, we propose Optimal Coefficient Calibration (OCC), an adaptive scheme that tracks the optimal coefficient online via a log-probability proxy at negligible cost. Across six competition-level mathematical reasoning benchmarks, OCC consistently matches or exceeds the detach baseline, delivering improved joint MTP-RL training performance.
2025
Faster and Better LLMs via Latency-Aware Test-Time Scaling
Zili Wang | Tianyu Zhang | Haoli Bai | Lu Hou | Xianzhi Yu | Wulong Liu | Shiming Xiang | Lei Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Zili Wang | Tianyu Zhang | Haoli Bai | Lu Hou | Xianzhi Yu | Wulong Liu | Shiming Xiang | Lei Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has proven effective in improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. However, existing research has overlooked the efficiency of TTS from a latency-sensitive perspective. Through a latency-aware evaluation of representative TTS methods, we demonstrate that a compute-optimal TTS does not always result in the lowest latency in scenarios where latency is critical. To address this gap and achieve latency-optimal TTS, we propose two key approaches by optimizing the concurrency configurations: (1) branch-wise parallelism, which leverages multiple concurrent inference branches, and (2) sequence-wise parallelism, enabled by speculative decoding. By integrating these two approaches and allocating computational resources properly to each, our latency-optimal TTS enables a 32B model to reach 82.3% accuracy on MATH-500 within 1 minute and a smaller 3B model to achieve 72.4% within 10 seconds. Our work emphasizes the importance of latency-aware TTS and demonstrates its ability to deliver both speed and accuracy in latency-sensitive scenarios.