Related papers: Decoupling the Benefits of Subword Tokenization fo…

Tokenisation is a core part of language models (LMs). It involves splitting a character sequence into subwords which are assigned arbitrary indices before being served to the LM. While typically lossless, however, this process may lead to…

Modern language models mostly take sub-words as input, a design that balances the trade-off between vocabulary size, number of parameters, and performance. However, sub-word tokenization still has disadvantages like not being robust to…

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…

Tokenization significantly influences language models(LMs)' performance. This paper traces the evolution of tokenizers from word-level to subword-level, analyzing how they balance tokens and types to enhance model adaptability while…

Recent advances in generative AI have been largely driven by large language models (LLMs), deep neural networks that operate over discrete units called tokens. To represent text, the vast majority of LLMs use words or word fragments as the…

Tokenization is a fundamental component of large language models (LLMs), yet its influence on model scaling and performance is not fully explored. In this paper, we introduce Over-Tokenized Transformers, a novel framework that decouples…

Tokenization is widely used in large language models because it significantly improves performance. However, tokenization imposes several disadvantages, such as performance biases, increased adversarial vulnerability, decreased…

Tokenization is an understudied and often neglected component of modern LLMs. Most published works use a single tokenizer for all experiments, often borrowed from another model, without performing ablations or analysis to optimize…

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in…

Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary, a process inherently sensitive to typographical errors, length variations, and largely oblivious to the internal structure of…

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…

Subword tokenization introduces a computational layer in language models where many distinct token sequences decode to the same surface form and preserve meaning, yet induce different internal computations. Despite this non-uniqueness,…

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…

Speech tokenization serves as the foundation of speech language model (LM), enabling them to perform various tasks such as spoken language modeling, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, etc. Most speech tokenizers are trained independently of…

Recent work on tokenizer-free multilingual pretrained models show promising results in improving cross-lingual transfer and reducing engineering overhead (Clark et al., 2022; Xue et al., 2022). However, these works mainly focus on reporting…

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…

Modern language models are typically trained over subword sequences, but ultimately define probabilities over character-strings. Ideally, the choice of the tokeniser -- which maps character-strings to subwords -- should not affect the…

Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization, although comparative evaluations of subword vocabulary quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm…

The purpose of speech tokenization is to transform a speech signal into a sequence of discrete representations, serving as the foundation for speech language models (SLMs). While speech tokenization has many options, their effect on the…

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…