# Efficient Pre-Training with Token Superposition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06546/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)
- [MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06395/) (2024)
- [PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11277/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02954/) (2024)
- [Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11089/) (2025)
- [Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19737/) (2024)
- [SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02737/) (2025)
- [UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05131/) (2022)
- [Scaling Latent Reasoning via Looped Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25741/) (2025)
- [Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09871/) (2024)
- [Language models scale reliably with over-training and on downstream tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08540/) (2024)
- [Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup: A New Axis of Sparsity for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07372/) (2026)
- [TorchTitan: One-stop PyTorch native solution for production ready LLM pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06511/) (2024)
- [Understanding Warmup-Stable-Decay Learning Rates: A River Valley Loss Landscape Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05192/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Chunking for End-to-End Hierarchical Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07955/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13862/) (2026)
- [Byte Language Models: Scaling, Emergent Abstractions, and Information Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05978/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.