Autoregressive Language Models are Secretly Energy-Based Models: Insights into the Lookahead Capabilities of Next-Token Prediction

arXiv:2512.15605v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive models (ARMs) currently constitute the dominant paradigm for large language models (LLMs). Energy-based models (EBMs) represent another class of models, which have historically been less prevalent in LLM development, yet naturally characterize the optimal policy in post-training alignment. In this paper, we provide a unified view of these two model classes. Taking the chain rule of probability as a starting point, we establish an explicit bijection between ARMs and EBMs in function space, which we show to correspond to a specia

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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