Parallel Token Prediction for Language Models

Felix Draxler, Justus Will, Farrin Sofian, THEOFANIS KARALETSOS, Sameer Singh, Stephan Mandt

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Autoregressive decoding in language models is inherently slow, generating only one token per forward pass. We propose Parallel Token Prediction (PTP), a general-purpose framework for predicting multiple tokens in a single model call. PTP moves the source of randomness from post-hoc sampling to random input variables, making future tokens deterministic functions of those inputs and thus jointly predictable in a single forward pass. We prove that a single PTP call can represent arbitrary dependencies between tokens. PTP is trained by distilling an existing model or through inverse autoregressive training without a teacher. Experimentally, PTP achieves a 2.4$\times$ speedup on a diverse-task speculative decoding benchmark. We provide code and checkpoints at https://github.com/mandt-lab/ptp.