English
Related papers

Related papers: An Information-Theoretic Perspective on LLM Tokeni…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks by understanding input information and predicting corresponding outputs. However, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs comprehend input and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Zhou Yang , Zhengyu Qi , Zhaochun Ren , Zhikai Jia , Haizhou Sun , Xiaofei Zhu , Xiangwen Liao

Large language models are trained with tokenizers, and the resulting token distribution is highly imbalanced: a few words dominate the stream while most occur rarely. Recent practice favors ever-larger vocabularies, but it is unclear where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Woojin Chung , Jeonghoon Kim

Tokenization efficiency plays a critical role in the performance and cost of large language models (LLMs), yet most models rely on static tokenizers optimized on general-purpose corpora. These tokenizers' fixed vocabularies often fail to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Saibo Geng , Nathan Ranchin , Yunzhen yao , Maxime Peyrard , Chris Wendler , Michael Gastpar , Robert West

In this paper, we study whether an off-the-shelf LLM can be adapted into a discrete, variable-length token compressor and decompressor for long-context processing. To this end, we design a self-expressive autoencoding framework that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Wenbing Li , Yiran Wang , Zikai Song , Jielei Zhang , Tianhao Zhao , Junkai Lin , Wei Yang

There is a belief that learning to compress well will lead to intelligence. Recently, language modeling has been shown to be equivalent to compression, which offers a compelling rationale for the success of large language models (LLMs): the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Yuzhen Huang , Jinghan Zhang , Zifei Shan , Junxian He

While scaling laws for Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally focus on proxy metrics like pretraining loss, predicting downstream task performance has been considered unreliable. This paper challenges that view by proposing a direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Jakub Krajewski , Amitis Shidani , Dan Busbridge , Sam Wiseman , Jason Ramapuram

Text representation plays a critical role in tasks like clustering, retrieval, and other downstream applications. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in harnessing their capabilities for this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Yeqin Zhang , Yizheng Zhao , Chen Hu , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Ruihang Miao , Cam-Tu Nguyen

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios is hindered by computational inefficiency and significant information redundancy. Although recent advancements have widely adopted context compression to address these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Kangtao Lv , Jiwei Tang , Langming Liu , Haibin Chen , Weidong Zhang , Shilei Liu , Yongwei Wang , Yujin Yuan , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

Large language models (LLMs) are in need of sufficient contexts to handle many critical applications, such as retrieval augmented generation and few-shot learning. However, due to the constrained window size, the LLMs can only access to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Ninglu Shao , Shitao Xiao , Zheng Liu , Peitian Zhang

Counting is one of the fundamental abilities of large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). This paper examines how these foundation models represent and compute numerical information in counting tasks. We use…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Hosein Hasani , Amirmohammad Izadi , Fatemeh Askari , Mobin Bagherian , Sadegh Mohammadian , Mohammad Izadi , Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Pavel Chizhov , Egor Bogomolov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

Subword tokenization is a key part of many NLP pipelines. However, little is known about why some tokenizer and hyperparameter combinations lead to better downstream model performance than others. We propose that good tokenizers lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Vilém Zouhar , Clara Meister , Juan Luis Gastaldi , Li Du , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Large language models (LLMs) process and predict sequences containing text to answer questions, and address tasks including document summarization, providing recommendations, writing software and solving quantitative problems. We provide a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Ricardo Baptista , Andrew Stuart , Son Tran

Learning, prediction, and compression are intimately connected: a model that accurately predicts the next symbol in a sequence can be coupled with a source coder to compress that sequence near its information-theoretic limit. When tokenized…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Vishnu Teja Kunde , Jean-Francois Chamberland , Krishna R. Narayanan , Jamison Ebert

Modern tokenizers employ deterministic algorithms to map text into a single "canonical" token sequence, yet the same string can be encoded as many non-canonical tokenizations using the tokenizer vocabulary. In this work, we investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Siyuan Zheng , Alisa Liu , Orevaoghene Ahia , Jonathan Hayase , Yejin Choi , Noah A. Smith

In this paper, we explore the idea of training large language models (LLMs) over highly compressed text. While standard subword tokenizers compress text by a small factor, neural text compressors can achieve much higher rates of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Brian Lester , Jaehoon Lee , Alex Alemi , Jeffrey Pennington , Adam Roberts , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Noah Constant

Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Avijit Thawani , Saurabh Ghanekar , Xiaoyuan Zhu , Jay Pujara

Large Language Models (LLMs) incur significant computational and memory costs when processing long prompts, as full self-attention scales quadratically with input length. Token compression aims to address this challenge by reducing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Zihao Xu , John Harvill , Ziwei Fan , Yizhou Sun , Hao Ding , Hao Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Andrea Pinto , Tomer Galanti , Randall Balestriero

Transformer based large language models have achieved tremendous success. However, the significant memory and computational costs incurred during the inference process make it challenging to deploy large models on resource-constrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Wenxiao Wang , Wei Chen , Yicong Luo , Yongliu Long , Zhengkai Lin , Liye Zhang , Binbin Lin , Deng Cai , Xiaofei He