Related papers: Local Byte Fusion for Neural Machine Translation

Many NLP models operate over sequences of subword tokens produced by hand-crafted tokenization rules and heuristic subword induction algorithms. A simple universal alternative is to represent every computerized text as a sequence of bytes…

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…

Modern language models mostly take sub-words as input, a design that balances the trade-off between vocabulary size, number of parameters, and performance. However, sub-word tokenization still has disadvantages like not being robust to…

Subword tokenization is a common method for vocabulary building in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. However, increasingly complex tasks have revealed its disadvantages. First, a vocabulary cannot be modified once it is learned,…

Almost all existing machine translation models are built on top of character-based vocabularies: characters, subwords or words. Rare characters from noisy text or character-rich languages such as Japanese and Chinese however can…

Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…

Subword tokenization is an essential part of modern large language models (LLMs), yet its specific contributions to training efficiency and model performance remain poorly understood. In this work, we decouple the effects of subword…

Tokenization significantly influences language models(LMs)' performance. This paper traces the evolution of tokenizers from word-level to subword-level, analyzing how they balance tokens and types to enhance model adaptability while…

Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages.…

What are the units of text that we want to model? From bytes to multi-word expressions, text can be analyzed and generated at many granularities. Until recently, most natural language processing (NLP) models operated over words, treating…

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…

Tokenization is the act of breaking down text into smaller parts, or tokens, that are easier for machines to process. This is a key phase in machine translation (MT) models. Subword tokenization enhances this process by breaking down words…

Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing, breaking text into units that computational models can process. While learned subword tokenizers have become the de-facto standard, they present challenges such as large…

Tokenisation is the first step in almost all NLP tasks, and state-of-the-art transformer-based language models all use subword tokenisation algorithms to process input text. Existing algorithms have problems, often producing tokenisations…

Modern language models still rely on fixed, pre-defined subword tokenizations. Once a tokenizer is trained, the LM can only operate at this fixed level of granularity, which often leads to brittle and counterintuitive behaviors even in…

Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing…

Current language models (LMs) use a fixed, static subword tokenizer. This default choice typically results in degraded efficiency and language capabilities, especially in languages other than English. To address this issue, we challenge the…

Tokenization is widely used in large language models because it significantly improves performance. However, tokenization imposes several disadvantages, such as performance biases, increased adversarial vulnerability, decreased…

Recent advances in generative AI have been largely driven by large language models (LLMs), deep neural networks that operate over discrete units called tokens. To represent text, the vast majority of LLMs use words or word fragments as the…

The assumption across nearly all language model (LM) tokenization schemes is that tokens should be subwords, i.e., contained within word boundaries. While providing a seemingly reasonable inductive bias, is this common practice limiting the…