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InsNeXt: Training Scalable Insertion-based Language Models from Scratch

Authors

Sidi Lu, Jacky Dai, Xuezhe Ma, and Nanyun Peng

Overview

InsNeXt modernizes insertion-based language modeling for scalable pretraining. It combines sentence-level and document-level training, current language-model system components, and a context-encoding mechanism designed specifically for insertion-based decoding.

At inference time, sparse bidirectional re-encoding lets the model use both sides of an insertion context while preserving a computational profile comparable to conventional autoregressive decoding.

Results

The work scales InsNeXt from 154M to 573M parameters with a 4,096-token context window. Evaluations cover representation learning, commonsense reasoning, and controllable generation; the resulting models perform comparably to or better than similarly sized autoregressive baselines while retaining insertion-based controllability.

Paper

OpenReview

Status

Accepted at COLM 2026 Workshop.

Citation

Sidi Lu, Jacky Dai, Xuezhe Ma, and Nanyun Peng. “InsNeXt: Training Scalable Insertion-based Language Models from Scratch.” COLM 2026 Workshop, 2026.