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Compressing word embeddings is important for deploying NLP models in memory-constrained settings. However, understanding what makes compressed embeddings perform well on downstream tasks is challenging---existing measures of compression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Avner May , Jian Zhang , Tri Dao , Christopher Ré

Efficiency and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs), among other factors, rely on the quality of tokenization. A good tokenizer not only improves inference speed and language understanding but also provides extra defense against jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Pavel Chizhov , Egor Bogomolov , 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

Large language models achieve high performance on many but not all downstream tasks. The interaction between pretraining data and task data is commonly assumed to determine this variance: a task with data that is more similar to a model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Gregory Yauney , Emily Reif , David Mimno

Tokenization is the first step in modern neural language model pipelines where an input text is converted to a sequence of subword tokens. We introduce from first principles a finite-state transduction framework which can efficiently encode…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Marco Cognetta , Naoaki Okazaki

Choosing an appropriate tokenization scheme is often a bottleneck in low-resource cross-lingual transfer. To understand the downstream implications of text representation choices, we perform a comparative analysis on language models having…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Md Mushfiqur Rahman , Fardin Ahsan Sakib , Fahim Faisal , Antonios Anastasopoulos

The success of pretrained transformer language models (LMs) in natural language processing has led to a wide range of pretraining setups. In particular, these models employ a variety of subword tokenization methods, most notably byte-pair…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Kaj Bostrom , Greg Durrett

Modern language models are typically trained over subword sequences, but ultimately define probabilities over character-strings. Ideally, the choice of the tokeniser -- which maps character-strings to subwords -- should not affect the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Pietro Lesci , Clara Meister , Thomas Hofmann , Andreas Vlachos , Tiago Pimentel

Compressing large language models (LLMs), often consisting of billions of parameters, provides faster inference, smaller memory footprints, and enables local deployment. Two standard compression techniques are pruning and quantization, with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Satya Sai Srinath Namburi , Makesh Sreedhar , Srinath Srinivasan , Frederic Sala

Tokenizer adaptation plays an important role in adapting pre-trained language models to new domains or languages. In this work, we address two complementary aspects of this process: vocabulary extension and pruning. The common approach to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Taido Purason , Pavel Chizhov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov , Mark Fishel

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

To reduce the inference cost of large language models, model compression is increasingly used to create smaller scalable models. However, little is known about their robustness to minority subgroups defined by the labels and attributes of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Leonidas Gee , Andrea Zugarini , Novi Quadrianto

Tokenization is a hardcoded compression step which remains in the training pipeline of Large Language Models (LLMs), despite a general trend towards architectures becoming increasingly end-to-end. Prior work has shown promising results at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Sam Dauncey , Roger Wattenhofer

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used method for subword tokenization, with origins in grammar-based text compression. It is employed in a variety of language processing tasks such as machine translation or large language model (LLM)…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-14 László Kozma , Johannes Voderholzer

Subword tokenization is the de facto standard for tokenization in neural language models and machine translation systems. Three advantages are frequently cited in favor of subwords: shorter encoding of frequent tokens, compositionality of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Benoist Wolleb , Romain Silvestri , Giorgos Vernikos , Ljiljana Dolamic , Andrei Popescu-Belis

As a cornerstone in language modeling, tokenization involves segmenting text inputs into pre-defined atomic units. Conventional statistical tokenizers often disrupt constituent boundaries within words, thereby corrupting semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Qingyang Zhu , Xiang Hu , Pengyu Ji , Wei Wu , Kewei Tu

The best performing transformer-based language models use subword tokenization techniques, such as Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE). However, these approaches often overlook linguistic principles, such as morphological segmentation, which we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Mikkel Wildner Kildeberg , Emil Allerslev Schledermann , Nicolaj Larsen , Rob van der Goot

Transformer-based language models for code have shown remarkable performance in various software analytics tasks, but their adoption is hindered by high computational costs, slow inference speeds, and substantial environmental impact. Model…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Md. Abdul Awal , Mrigank Rochan , Chanchal K. Roy

Deep learning models have achieved tremendous success in most of the industries in recent years. The evolution of these models has also led to an increase in the model size and energy requirement, making it difficult to deploy in production…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Aayush Saxena , Arit Kumar Bishwas , Ayush Ashok Mishra , Ryan Armstrong

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Edward Gow-Smith , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Carolina Scarton , Aline Villavicencio