Related papers: T-FREE: Subword Tokenizer-Free Generative LLMs via…

Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models…

Recent work on tokenizer-free multilingual pretrained models show promising results in improving cross-lingual transfer and reducing engineering overhead (Clark et al., 2022; Xue et al., 2022). However, these works mainly focus on reporting…

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in…

Tokenization is a fundamental component of large language models (LLMs), yet its influence on model scaling and performance is not fully explored. In this paper, we introduce Over-Tokenized Transformers, a novel framework that decouples…

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…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have remarkably enhanced performances on a variety of tasks in multiple languages. However, tokenizers in LLMs trained primarily on English-centric corpora often overly fragment a text…

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the tokenization techniques employed by state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) and their implications on the cost and availability of services across different languages, especially low…

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…

Purely character-based language models (LMs) have been lagging in quality on large scale datasets, and current state-of-the-art LMs rely on word tokenization. It has been assumed that injecting the prior knowledge of a tokenizer into the…

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…

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…

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…

Language models (LMs) are bound to their tokenizer, which maps raw text to a sequence of vocabulary items (tokens). This restricts their flexibility: for example, LMs trained primarily on English may still perform well in other natural and…

Pretrained language models (LLMs) are often constrained by their fixed tokenization schemes, leading to inefficiencies and performance limitations, particularly for multilingual or specialized applications. This tokenizer lock-in presents…

Tokenizer is an essential component for large language models (LLMs), and a tokenizer with a high compression rate can improve the model's representation and processing efficiency. However, the tokenizer cannot ensure high compression rate…

Transformer-based pre-trained language models are vocabulary-dependent, mapping by default each token to its corresponding embedding. This one-to-one mapping results into embedding matrices that occupy a lot of memory (i.e. millions of…

Traditionally, NLP performance improvement has been focused on improving models and increasing the number of model parameters. NLP vocabulary construction has remained focused on maximizing the number of words represented through subword…

Modern language models operate on subword-tokenized text in order to make a trade-off between model size, inference speed, and vocabulary coverage. A side effect of this is that, during inference, models are evaluated by measuring the…

The embedding layers transforming input words into real vectors are the key components of deep neural networks used in natural language processing. However, when the vocabulary is large, the corresponding weight matrices can be enormous,…

Tokenization is an understudied and often neglected component of modern LLMs. Most published works use a single tokenizer for all experiments, often borrowed from another model, without performing ablations or analysis to optimize…