# Next-Token Prediction Learns Generalisable Representations of Sleep Physiology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [Large Brain Model for Learning Generic Representations with Tremendous EEG Data in BCI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18765/) (2024)
- [CLOCS: Contrastive Learning of Cardiac Signals Across Space, Time, and Patients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13249/) (2020)
- [Uncovering the structure of clinical EEG signals with self-supervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16104/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Training of Foundation Models for Wearable Biosignals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05409/) (2023)
- [ECG-FM: An Open Electrocardiogram Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05178/) (2024)
- [NeuroLM: A Universal Multi-task Foundation Model for Bridging the Gap between Language and EEG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00101/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised Learning for Human Activity Recognition Using 700,000 Person-days of Wearable Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02909/) (2022)
- [PaPaGei: Open Foundation Models for Optical Physiological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20542/) (2024)
- [Scaling Wearable Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13638/) (2024)
- [Identifiability Results for Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09166/) (2023)
- [SEANet: A Multi-modal Speech Enhancement Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02095/) (2020)
- [Dreem Open Datasets: Multi-Scored Sleep Datasets to compare Human and Automated sleep staging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03221/) (2019)
- [Stacked Quantizers for Compositional Vector Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.2173/) (2014)
- [BrainOmni: A Brain Foundation Model for Unified EEG and MEG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18185/) (2025)
- [LSM-2: Learning from Incomplete Wearable Sensor Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05321/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [On Sleep-Wake Disorder Identification from Polysomnographic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17451/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models offer a promising route to compress multi-modal physiological signals into compact representations of human health, with broad applications across sleep medicine, cardiology, neurology and other healthcare domains. Existing models have typically been trained with masked-reconstruction or contrastive objectives. However, masked reconstruction may be poorly suited to the stochastic nature of these signals, while contrastive approaches rely on positive-pair definitions despite the semantic invariances of physiological signals being poorly understood. In this work, we show that next-token prediction is a simple and scalable alternative. We develop Hypnos, a multi-modal sleep foundation model trained using eight different sensing modalities (e.g. EEG, ECG, respiratory signals) drawn from over 20,000 overnight polysomnography recordings. We tokenize each modality into streams of discrete tokens using residual vector quantization, then train a large auto-regressive RQ-Transformer to jointly predict the next token across all modalities in parallel. After training, Hypnos can be applied to continuous streams of sensor data from any subset of supported modalities, generating embeddings for downstream tasks. Across a range of benchmarks, Hypnos significantly outperforms existing foundation models. In sleep stage classification, we match the performance of strong supervised baselines on held-out test sets whilst using (100×) less labelled data. Hypnos even generalises to daytime physiology, surpassing a dedicated ECG foundation model at detecting atrial fibrillation. Our results demonstrate that next-token prediction is a strong self-supervised objective for representation learning from multi-modal physiological signals.