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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Saumitra Yadav , Manish Shrivastava

Tokenization is a crucial step in processing protein sequences for machine learning models, as proteins are complex sequences of amino acids that require meaningful segmentation to capture their functional and structural properties.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Burak Suyunu , Enes Taylan , Arzucan Özgür

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

Multimodal Large Language Models have made significant strides in integrating visual and textual information, yet they often struggle with effectively aligning these modalities. We introduce a novel image tokenizer that bridges this gap by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Wanpeng Zhang , Zilong Xie , Yicheng Feng , Yijiang Li , Xingrun Xing , Sipeng Zheng , Zongqing Lu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Avijit Thawani , Saurabh Ghanekar , Xiaoyuan Zhu , Jay Pujara

Sequence models for binary analysis are bottlenecked by byte-level tokenization: raw bytes waste precious context window capacity for transformers and other neural network architectures, and many existing text-oriented tokenizers fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Michael J. Bommarito

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

Typically, tokenization is the very first step in most text processing works. As a token serves as an atomic unit that embeds the contextual information of text, how to define a token plays a decisive role in the performance of a model.Even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Kyubyong Park , Joohong Lee , Seongbo Jang , Dawoon Jung

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

In language processing, transformers benefit greatly from text being condensed. This is achieved through a larger vocabulary that captures word fragments instead of plain characters. This is often done with Byte Pair Encoding. In the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Tim Elsner , Paula Usinger , Julius Nehring-Wirxel , Gregor Kobsik , Victor Czech , Yanjiang He , Isaak Lim , Leif Kobbelt

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Azam Nouri

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Sudhansu Bala Das , Samujjal Choudhury , Tapas Kumar Mishra , Bidyut Kr. Patra

Most neural machine translation systems are built upon subword units extracted by methods such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or wordpiece. However, the choice of number of merge operations is generally made by following existing recipes. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-26 Shuoyang Ding , Adithya Renduchintala , Kevin Duh

For different language pairs, word-level neural machine translation (NMT) models with a fixed-size vocabulary suffer from the same problem of representing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The common practice usually replaces all these rare or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Yingting Wu , Hai Zhao

Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar , Xiangpeng Wan , Yu Cheng , Junjie Hu

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 present frequency-ordered tokenization, a simple preprocessing technique that improves lossless text compression by exploiting the power-law frequency distribution of natural language tokens (Zipf's law). The method tokenizes text with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Maximilian Kalcher

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jonathan Hayase , Alisa Liu , Noah A. Smith , Sewoong Oh

Tokenization is an important first step in Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines because it decides how models learn and represent linguistic information. However, current subword tokenizers like SentencePiece or HuggingFace BPE are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Firoj Ahmmed Patwary , Abdullah Al Noman