Related papers: TokDrift: When LLM Speaks in Subwords but Code Spe…

Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has…

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.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet little is known about their training dynamics at the token level. Evaluation typically relies on aggregated training loss, measured at the batch level, which…

Tokenization is the first step in training any Large Language Model (LLM), where the text is split into a sequence of tokens as per the model's fixed vocabulary. This tokenization in LLMs is different from the traditional tokenization in…

The prevalent use of Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) in Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitates robust handling of subword units and avoids issues of out-of-vocabulary words. Despite its success, a critical challenge persists: long tokens, rich…

Gender-inclusive NLP research has documented the harmful limitations of gender binary-centric large language models (LLM), such as the inability to correctly use gender-diverse English neopronouns (e.g., xe, zir, fae). While data scarcity…

Tokenization is the first step in every language model (LM), yet it never takes the sounds of words into account. We investigate how tokenization influences text-only LMs' ability to represent phonological knowledge. Through a series of…

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…

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…

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…

Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to…

State-of-the-art language models are autoregressive and operate on subword units known as tokens. Specifically, one must encode the conditioning string into a list of tokens before passing to the language models for next-token prediction.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. Nonetheless, it was also witnessed that LLMs tend to produce inaccurate responses to specific queries. This deficiency can be traced…

Large language models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 perform very well on tasks that involve both natural language and source code, particularly code summarization and code generation. We show that for the task of code summarization, the…

Large pretrained language models (PLMs) typically tokenize the input string into contiguous subwords before any pretraining or inference. However, previous studies have claimed that this form of subword tokenization is inadequate for…

Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing…

Large language models (LLMs) often encode word-form variation (e.g., walk vs. walked) as linear directions in the embedding space. However, standard tokenization algorithms treat such variants as distinct words with different vocabulary…

Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly…

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…

Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it. Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages. In this paper, we show how…