OpenESM: Energy-Steered Models Are Scalable Foundation Learners

arXiv:2610.33005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Energy-based models have shown promising properties for domain-specific tasks but remain challenging in modeling general-purpose scenarios. To bridge this gap, we design energy-steered models (ESMs) for foundational language modeling. ESMs integrate energy steering and token generation within a single architecture to leverage the energy-guided search to refine token generation. Specifically, ESMs first optimize a latent state over the energy landscape, then leverages the refined latent state for token generation. By performing such energy-guided pre-training on large-scale corpora, ESMs learn generally effective energy landscape where favorable tokens correspond to lower energy values. To explore the scaling behavior of ESMs, we pre-train ESM