Related papers: Boundless Byte Pair Encoding: Breaking the Pre-tok…

Subword tokenization methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used in large language models due to their balance of vocabulary compactness and representational power. However, they suffer from inefficiencies in representing rare…

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…

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 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…

Tokenizers act as a bridge between human language and the latent space of language models, influencing how language is represented in these models. Due to the immense popularity of English-Centric Large Language Models (LLMs), efforts are…

The emergence of telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome assemblies has opened new avenues for comparative genomics, yet effective tokenization strategies for genomic sequences remain underexplored. In this pilot study, we apply Byte Pair…

We present BPEmb, a collection of pre-trained subword unit embeddings in 275 languages, based on Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE). In an evaluation using fine-grained entity typing as testbed, BPEmb performs competitively, and for some languages…

The pretraining data of today's strongest language models is opaque; in particular, little is known about the proportions of various domains or languages represented. In this work, we tackle a task which we call data mixture inference,…

Pretokenization is a crucial, sequential pass in Byte-level BPE tokenizers, yet little work has been done to optimize it for edge-side inference. Our proposed new implementation, Peek2, serves as a drop-in replacement for cl100k-like…

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…

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 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…

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…

Tokenization is the first - and often underappreciated - layer of computation in language models. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables transformer models to approximate recurrent computation by externalizing intermediate steps, we…

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…

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…

Subword tokenization has become the prevailing standard in the field of natural language processing (NLP) over recent years, primarily due to the widespread utilization of pre-trained language models. This shift began with Byte-Pair…

Multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) requires tokenization that efficiently covers many writing systems. Byte-level BPE (BBPE) using UTF-8 is widely adopted for its language-agnostic design and full Unicode coverage, but its…

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…

Unlike hybrid speech recognition systems where the use of tokens was restricted to phones, biphones or triphones the choice of tokens in the end-to-end ASR systems is derived from the text corpus of the training data. The use of…