Related papers: Bit-level BPE: Below the byte boundary

Modern language models mostly take sub-words as input, a design that balances the trade-off between vocabulary size, number of parameters, and performance. However, sub-word tokenization still has disadvantages like not being robust to…

Modern language models are internally -- and mathematically -- distributions over $\it{token}$ strings rather than $\it{character}$ strings, posing numerous challenges for programmers building user applications on top of them. For example,…

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…

Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a ubiquitous algorithm in the subword tokenization process of language models as it provides multiple benefits. However, this process is solely based on pre-training data statistics, making it hard for the…

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) has become a widely adopted subword tokenization method in modern language models due to its simplicity and strong empirical performance across downstream tasks. However, applying BPE to unsegmented languages such…

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…

Pre-tokenization, the initial step in many modern tokenization pipelines, segments text into smaller units called pretokens, typically splitting on whitespace and punctuation. While this process encourages having full, individual words as…

We introduce a morpheme-aware subword tokenization method that utilizes sub-character decomposition to address the challenges of applying Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) to Korean, a language characterized by its rich morphology and unique writing…

We propose a generalization of neural network sequence models. Instead of predicting one symbol at a time, our multi-scale model makes predictions over multiple, potentially overlapping multi-symbol tokens. A variation of the byte-pair…

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…

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…

Character-level language models obviate the need for separately trained tokenizers, but efficiency suffers from longer sequence lengths. Learning to combine character representations into tokens has made training these models more…

The popular subword tokenizers of current language models, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), are known not to respect morpheme boundaries, which affects the downstream performance of the models. While many improved tokenization algorithms…

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…

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…

On word segmentation problems, machine learning architecture engineering often draws attention. The problem representation itself, however, has remained almost static as either word lattice ranking or character sequence tagging, for at…

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…

We present a method to compress the final linear layer of language models, reducing memory usage by up to 3.4x without significant performance loss. By grouping tokens based on Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) merges, we prevent materialization of…

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used tokenization algorithm, whose tokens cannot extend across pre-tokenization boundaries, functionally limiting it to representing at most full words. The BoundlessBPE and SuperBPE algorithms extend…

The assumption across nearly all language model (LM) tokenization schemes is that tokens should be subwords, i.e., contained within word boundaries. While providing a seemingly reasonable inductive bias, is this common practice limiting the…