Related papers: LBPE: Long-token-first Tokenization to Improve Lar…

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…

NMT systems have problems with large vocabulary sizes. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a popular approach to solving this problem, but while BPE allows the system to generate any target-side word, it does not enable effective generalization…

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…

Subword tokenization is a key design choice for modern language models, including large language models (LLMs), with byte- and character-level BPE serving as a widely used baseline. Standard BPE selects merges by raw pair frequency, which…

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is an algorithm commonly used in Natural Language Processing to build a vocabulary of subwords, which has been recently applied to symbolic music. Given that symbolic music can differ significantly from text,…

Discretizing speech into tokens and generating them by a decoder-only model have been a promising direction for text-to-speech (TTS) and spoken language modeling (SLM). To shorten the sequence length of speech tokens, acoustic byte-pair…

Discrete audio tokens derived from self-supervised learning models have gained widespread usage in speech generation. However, current practice of directly utilizing audio tokens poses challenges for sequence modeling due to the length of…

Tokenization is a crucial step in NLP, especially with the rise of large language models (LLMs), impacting downstream performance, computational cost, and efficiency. Existing LLMs rely on the classical Byte-pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm…

Tokenization underlies every large language model, yet it remains an under-theorized and inconsistently designed component. Common subword approaches such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) offer scalability but often misalign with linguistic…

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…

Tokenization is fundamental to how language models represent and process text, yet the behavior of widely used BPE tokenizers has received far less study than model architectures and training. In this paper, we investigate intermediate…

Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary, a process inherently sensitive to typographical errors, length variations, and largely oblivious to the internal structure of…

By processing electronic health records (EHRs) as natural language sequences, large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in clinical prediction tasks such as mortality prediction and phenotyping. However, longitudinal or highly…

Existing Machine Translation (MT) research often suggests a single, fixed set of hyperparameters for word segmentation models, symmetric Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which applies the same number of merge operations (NMO) to train tokenizers…

Gender-inclusive NLP research has documented the harmful limitations of gender binary-centric large language models (LLM), such as the inability to correctly use gender-diverse English neopronouns (e.g., xe, zir, fae). While data scarcity…

The cold-start issue is the challenge when we talk about recommender systems, especially in the case when we do not have the past interaction data of new users or new items. Content-based features or hybrid solutions are common as…

Tokenization is used almost universally by modern language models, enabling efficient text representation using multi-byte or multi-character tokens. However, prior work has shown that tokenization can introduce distortion into the model's…

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…

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…

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…