Related papers: Sampling from Your Language Model One Byte at a Ti…

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…

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…

Modern language models are trained almost exclusively on token sequences produced by a fixed tokenizer, an external lossless compressor often over UTF-8 byte sequences, thereby coupling the model to that compressor. This work introduces…

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…

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…

Despite their remarkable progress across diverse domains, Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently fail at simple character-level tasks, such as counting letters in words, due to a fundamental limitation: tokenization. In this work, we…

Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of…

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…

As the ever-increasing token limits of large language models (LLMs) have enabled long context as input, prompting with single data samples might no longer an efficient way. A straightforward strategy improving efficiency is to batch data…

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…

Autoregressive decoding in language models is inherently slow, generating only one token per forward pass. We propose Parallel Token Prediction (PTP), a general-purpose framework for predicting multiple tokens in a single model call. PTP…

Model ensembling is a technique to combine the predicted distributions of two or more models, often leading to improved robustness and performance. For ensembling in text generation, the next token's probability distribution is derived from…

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…

Autoregressive language models accumulate errors due to their fixed, irrevocable left-to-right token generation. To address this, we propose a new sampling method called Resample-Previous-Tokens (RPT). RPT mitigates error accumulation by…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse tasks, leading individuals to increasingly use them as personal assistants and universal computing engines. Nevertheless, a notable obstacle emerges…

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…

Byte Language Models (BLMs) have emerged as a promising direction for scaling language models beyond tokenization. However, existing BLMs typically require training from scratch on trillions of bytes, making them prohibitively expensive. In…

Tokenization is a hardcoded compression step which remains in the training pipeline of Large Language Models (LLMs), despite a general trend towards architectures becoming increasingly end-to-end. Prior work has shown promising results at…

To drive progress in science and engineering, large language models (LLMs) must be able to process large amounts of numerical data and solve long calculations efficiently. This is currently only possible through the use of external tools or…

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…