English
Related papers

Related papers: BPE-Dropout: Simple and Effective Subword Regulari…

200 papers

Standard Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization compresses text by pairing a learned token vocabulary with a detailed merge list. Recent work has shown that this merge list exposes a potential attack surface for extracting information about…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Tomohiro Sawada , Kartik Goyal

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) serves as a foundation method for text tokenization in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. Despite its wide adoption, the original BPE algorithm harbors an inherent flaw: it inadvertently introduces a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Haoran Lian , Yizhe Xiong , Jianwei Niu , Shasha Mo , Zhenpeng Su , Zijia Lin , Hui Chen , Peng Liu , Jungong Han , Guiguang Ding

Having recognized gender bias as a major issue affecting current translation technologies, researchers have primarily attempted to mitigate it by working on the data front. However, whether algorithmic aspects concur to exacerbate unwanted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Marco Gaido , Beatrice Savoldi , Luisa Bentivogli , Matteo Negri , Marco Turchi

Byte pair encoding (BPE) emerges as an effective tokenization method for tackling the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) challenge in various natural language and speech processing tasks. Recent research highlights the dependency of BPE subword…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Ahnaf Mozib Samin

Subword units are an effective way to alleviate the open vocabulary problems in neural machine translation (NMT). While sentences are usually converted into unique subword sequences, subword segmentation is potentially ambiguous and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Taku Kudo

Subword regularizations use multiple subword segmentations during training to improve the robustness of neural machine translation models. In previous subword regularizations, we use multiple segmentations in the training process but use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Sho Takase , Tatsuya Hiraoka , Naoaki Okazaki

Pre-tokenization, the initial step in many modern tokenization pipelines, segments text into smaller units called pretokens, typically splitting on whitespace and punctuation. While this process encourages having full, individual words as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Craig W. Schmidt , Varshini Reddy , Chris Tanner , Yuval Pinter

Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a ubiquitous algorithm in the subword tokenization process of language models as it provides multiple benefits. However, this process is solely based on pre-training data statistics, making it hard for the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Gustavo Aguilar , Bryan McCann , Tong Niu , Nazneen Rajani , Nitish Keskar , Thamar Solorio

In this work, we show a fundamental limitation in vocabulary adaptation approaches that use Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization scheme for fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) to expert domains. Current approaches trivially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Gunjan Balde , Soumyadeep Roy , Mainack Mondal , Niloy Ganguly

We introduce three simple randomized variants of byte pair encoding (BPE) and explore whether randomizing the selection of merge operations substantially affects a downstream machine translation task. We focus on translation into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Jonne Sälevä , Constantine Lignos

Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Vijini Liyanage , François Yvon

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a popular algorithm used for tokenizing data in NLP, despite being devised initially as a compression method. BPE appears to be a greedy algorithm at face value, but the underlying optimization problem that BPE…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Vilém Zouhar , Clara Meister , Juan Luis Gastaldi , Li Du , Tim Vieira , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Negar Foroutan , Clara Meister , Debjit Paul , Joel Niklaus , Sina Ahmadi , Antoine Bosselut , Rico Sennrich

The Byte Pair Encoding algorithm can be safely batched to merge hundreds of pairs of tokens at a time when building up a tokenizer's vocabulary. This technique combined with reducing the memory footprint of text used in vocabulary training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Alexander P. Morgan

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers, widely used in Large Language Models, face challenges in multilingual settings, including penalization of non-Western scripts and the creation of tokens with partial UTF-8 sequences. Pretokenization,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Sander Land , Catherine Arnett

Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Craig W. Schmidt , Varshini Reddy , Haoran Zhang , Alec Alameddine , Omri Uzan , Yuval Pinter , Chris Tanner

Traditional greedy tokenization methods have been a critical step in Natural Language Processing (NLP), influencing how text is converted into tokens and directly impacting model performance. While subword tokenizers like Byte-Pair Encoding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Bharath Raj , Garvit Suri , Vikrant Dewangan , Raghav Sonavane

This paper proposes a new regularization algorithm referred to as macro-block dropout. The overfitting issue has been a difficult problem in training large neural network models. The dropout technique has proven to be simple yet very…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Chanwoo Kim , Sathish Indurti , Jinhwan Park , Wonyong Sung

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Pavel Chizhov , Catherine Arnett , Elizaveta Korotkova , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

Tokenization imposes a fixed granularity on the input text, freezing how a language model operates on data and how far in the future it predicts. Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and similar schemes split text once, build a static vocabulary, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Mathurin Videau , Badr Youbi Idrissi , Alessandro Leite , Marc Schoenauer , Olivier Teytaud , David Lopez-Paz