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Image tokenization, the process of transforming raw image pixels into a compact low-dimensional latent representation, has proven crucial for scalable and efficient image generation. However, mainstream image tokenization methods generally…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Kaiwen Zha , Lijun Yu , Alireza Fathi , David A. Ross , Cordelia Schmid , Dina Katabi , Xiuye Gu

To guarantee that an LLM's outputs conform to a specified structure, context-free grammar (CFG) decoding engines force the selection of next tokens that produce strings that conform to a given CFG. While current CFG-constrained decoding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Negar Foroutan , Clara Meister , Debjit Paul , Joel Niklaus , Sina Ahmadi , Antoine Bosselut , Rico Sennrich

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) has become a widely adopted subword tokenization method in modern language models due to its simplicity and strong empirical performance across downstream tasks. However, applying BPE to unsegmented languages such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Yifan Hu , Frank Liang , Dachuan Zhao , Jonathan Geuter , Varshini Reddy , Craig W. Schmidt , Chris Tanner

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Buu Phan , Marton Havasi , Matthew Muckley , Karen Ullrich

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 imposes a fixed granularity on the input text, freezing how a language model operates on data and how far in the future it predicts. Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and similar schemes split text once, build a static vocabulary, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Mathurin Videau , Badr Youbi Idrissi , Alessandro Leite , Marc Schoenauer , Olivier Teytaud , David Lopez-Paz

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Lin Zheng , Xinyu Li , Qian Liu , Xiachong Feng , Lingpeng Kong

Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar , Xiangpeng Wan , Yu Cheng , Junjie Hu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Buu Phan , Brandon Amos , Itai Gat , Marton Havasi , Matthew Muckley , Karen Ullrich

Tokenization is a crucial step in information retrieval, especially for lexical matching algorithms, where the quality of indexable tokens directly impacts the effectiveness of a retrieval system. Since different languages have unique…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Odunayo Ogundepo , Xinyu Zhang , Jimmy Lin

Tokenization is the first step in modern neural language model pipelines where an input text is converted to a sequence of subword tokens. We introduce from first principles a finite-state transduction framework which can efficiently encode…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Marco Cognetta , Naoaki Okazaki

Vision Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across various computer vision tasks, yet their quadratic computational complexity concerning token length remains a significant challenge. To address this, token reduction…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Dong-Jae Lee , Jiwan Hur , Jaehyun Choi , Jaemyung Yu , Junmo Kim

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) serves as a foundation method for text tokenization in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. Despite its wide adoption, the original BPE algorithm harbors an inherent flaw: it inadvertently introduces a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Haoran Lian , Yizhe Xiong , Jianwei Niu , Shasha Mo , Zhenpeng Su , Zijia Lin , Hui Chen , Peng Liu , Jungong Han , Guiguang Ding

Compression algorithms reduce the redundancy in data representation to decrease the storage required for that data. Data compression offers an attractive approach to reducing communication costs by using available bandwidth effectively.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2007-07-13 B. S. Shajee Mohan , V. K. Govindan

Large Language Models have proven highly successful at modelling a variety of tasks. However, this comes at a steep computational cost that hinders wider industrial uptake. In this paper, we present MWT: a Multi-Word Tokenizer that goes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Leonidas Gee , Leonardo Rigutini , Marco Ernandes , Andrea Zugarini

Bitmap indexes must be compressed to reduce input/output costs and minimize CPU usage. To accelerate logical operations (AND, OR, XOR) over bitmaps, we use techniques based on run-length encoding (RLE), such as Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH)…

Databases · Computer Science 2016-08-02 Daniel Lemire , Owen Kaser , Kamel Aouiche

Despite it being the cornerstone of BPE, the most common tokenization algorithm, the importance of compression in the tokenization process is still unclear. In this paper, we argue for the theoretical importance of compression, that can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Omer Goldman , Avi Caciularu , Matan Eyal , Kris Cao , Idan Szpektor , Reut Tsarfaty

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Vijini Liyanage , François Yvon