Related papers: LiteToken: Removing Intermediate Merge Residues Fr…

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…

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…

Tokenizer adaptation plays an important role in adapting pre-trained language models to new domains or languages. In this work, we address two complementary aspects of this process: vocabulary extension and pruning. The common approach to…

We introduce a new tokenizer for language models that minimizes the average tokens per character, thereby reducing the number of tokens needed to represent text during training and to generate text during inference. Our method, which we…

Adapting language models to new data distributions by simple finetuning is challenging. This is due to the rigidity of their subword tokenizers, which typically remain unchanged during adaptation. This inflexibility often leads to…

Tokenization underlies every large language model, yet it remains an under-theorized and inconsistently designed component. Common subword approaches such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) offer scalability but often misalign with linguistic…

Most neural machine translation systems are built upon subword units extracted by methods such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or wordpiece. However, the choice of number of merge operations is generally made by following existing recipes. In…

Discrete audio tokens derived from self-supervised learning models have gained widespread usage in speech generation. However, current practice of directly utilizing audio tokens poses challenges for sequence modeling due to the length of…

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…

Cross-lingual vocabulary transfer plays a promising role in adapting pre-trained language models to new languages, including low-resource languages. Existing approaches that utilize monolingual or parallel corpora face challenges when…

When used with deep learning, the symbolic music modality is often coupled with language model architectures. To do so, the music needs to be tokenized, i.e. converted into a sequence of discrete tokens. This can be achieved by different…

Generative language models are usually pretrained on large text corpus via predicting the next token (i.e., sub-word/word/phrase) given the previous ones. Recent works have demonstrated the impressive performance of large generative…

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…

Tokenization is an important text preprocessing step to prepare input tokens for deep language models. WordPiece and BPE are de facto methods employed by important models, such as BERT and GPT. However, the impact of tokenization can be…

Tokenizer is an essential component for large language models (LLMs), and a tokenizer with a high compression rate can improve the model's representation and processing efficiency. However, the tokenizer cannot ensure high compression rate…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning and planning when trained on chainof-thought (CoT) data, where the step-by-step thought process is explicitly outlined by text tokens. However, this results in lengthy inputs where many words…

Tokenization is used almost universally by modern language models, enabling efficient text representation using multi-byte or multi-character tokens. However, prior work has shown that tokenization can introduce distortion into the model's…

Subword tokenization is a key design choice for modern language models, including large language models (LLMs), with byte- and character-level BPE serving as a widely used baseline. Standard BPE selects merges by raw pair frequency, which…

Sequence models for binary analysis are bottlenecked by byte-level tokenization: raw bytes waste precious context window capacity for transformers and other neural network architectures, and many existing text-oriented tokenizers fail on…