Beyond Tokens: Concept-Level Training Objectives for LLMs

Abstract

The next-token prediction (NTP) objective has been foundational in the development of modern large language models (LLMs), driving advances in fluency and generalization. However, NTP operates at the \textit{token} level, treating deviations from a single reference continuation as errors even when alternative continuations are equally plausible or semantically equivalent (e.g., ``mom'' vs. ``mother''). As a result, token-level loss can penalize valid abstractions, paraphrases, or conceptually correct reasoning paths, biasing models toward surface form rather than underlying meaning. This mismatch between the training signal and semantic correctness motivates learning objectives that operate over higher-level representations. We propose a shift from token-level to concept-level prediction, where concepts group multiple surface forms of the same idea (e.g., ``mom,'' ``mommy,'' ``mother'' $\rightarrow$ \textit{MOTHER}). We introduce various methods for integrating conceptual supervision into LLM training and show that concept-aware models achieve lower perplexity, improved robustness under domain shift, and stronger performance than NTP-based models on diverse NLP benchmarks. This suggests \textit{concept-level supervision} as an improved training signal that better aligns LLMs with human semantic abstractions.