Related papers: From Bytes to Ideas: Language Modeling with Autore…

This paper introduces Dynamic Programming Encoding (DPE), a new segmentation algorithm for tokenizing sentences into subword units. We view the subword segmentation of output sentences as a latent variable that should be marginalized out…

The effectiveness of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models largely depends on the vocabulary used at training; small vocabularies can lead to out-of-vocabulary problems -- large ones, to memory issues. Subword (SW) tokenization has been…

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,…

In neural machine translation (NMT), it is has become standard to translate using subword units to allow for an open vocabulary and improve accuracy on infrequent words. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) and its variants are the predominant approach…

In recent years, neural machine translation (NMT) has become the dominant approach in automated translation. However, like many other deep learning approaches, NMT suffers from overfitting when the amount of training data is limited. This…

Tokenizers are crucial for encoding information in Large Language Models, but their development has recently stagnated, and they contain inherent weaknesses. Major limitations include computational overhead, ineffective vocabulary use, and…

Tokenization - the practice of converting strings of characters from an alphabet into sequences of tokens over a vocabulary - is a critical step in the NLP pipeline. The use of token representations is widely credited with increased model…

Tokenization is a necessary component within the current architecture of many language mod-els, including the transformer-based large language models (LLMs) of Generative AI, yet its impact on the model's cognition is often overlooked. We…

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…

Pipelined NLP systems have largely been superseded by end-to-end neural modeling, yet nearly all commonly-used models still require an explicit tokenization step. While recent tokenization approaches based on data-derived subword lexicons…

Neural networks for computer vision extract uninterpretable features despite achieving high accuracy on benchmarks. In contrast, humans can explain their predictions using succinct and intuitive descriptions. To incorporate explainability…

Diffusion language models generate text through iterative refinement, a process that is often computationally inefficient because many tokens reach stability long before the final denoising step. We introduce a training-free, token-level…

In biomedical literature, it is common for entity boundaries to not align with word boundaries. Therefore, effective identification of entity spans requires approaches capable of considering tokens that are smaller than words. We introduce…

Recurrent neural networks have been very successful at predicting sequences of words in tasks such as language modeling. However, all such models are based on the conventional classification framework, where the model is trained against…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion…

Modern language models have historically relied on two dominant design choices: subword tokenization and autoregressive (AR) ordering. These design decisions bake in priors that dictate a model's learning. Recently, two alternative…

Inflectional variation is a common feature of World Englishes such as Colloquial Singapore English and African American Vernacular English. Although comprehension by human readers is usually unimpaired by non-standard inflections, current…

Generative models, from diffusion models to large language models, achieve remarkable performance but at a cost in training data orders of magnitude larger than what biological learners require. An alternative paradigm has emerged in which…

We present two end-to-end models: Audio-to-Byte (A2B) and Byte-to-Audio (B2A), for multilingual speech recognition and synthesis. Prior work has predominantly used characters, sub-words or words as the unit of choice to model text. These…

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…