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New research disentangles tokenization algorithms for language models

Researchers have introduced two new tokenization algorithms, BottomUpLL and TopDownComp, to disentangle the effects of optimization objectives and search procedures in language model tokenizers. By creating a 2x2 design space, they compared bottom-up and top-down approaches with compression and log-likelihood objectives. Their findings indicate that the search procedure, rather than the objective, is the primary driver of performance, with bottom-up tokenizers generally achieving lower bits-per-byte. However, no consistent relationship was found between design choices and performance on the BLiMP task. AI

IMPACT Provides guidance for more principled construction of tokenizers, potentially improving language model efficiency and performance.

RANK_REASON Academic paper detailing new algorithms and experimental results. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.AI →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

New research disentangles tokenization algorithms for language models

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Academic paper detailing new algorithms and experimental results. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Ahmetcan Yavuz, Clara Meister, Tiago Pimentel ·

    Objective vs. Search: Decomposing What Makes a Good Tokeniser

    arXiv:2609.19145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Two dominant tokenisation algorithms are used by modern language models: byte-pair encoding (BPE) and UnigramLM. These differ along two orthogonal axes: their optimisation objective (compression vs. log-likelihood) and their searc…