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Bridging the Gap for Tokenizer-Free Language Models

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arxiv 1908.10322 v1 pith:HXMHXSWP submitted 2019-08-27 cs.CL cs.AIcs.IRcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.IRcs.LG
keywords modelstokenizer-freeachievebeencompetitivelanguagelargescale
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Purely character-based language models (LMs) have been lagging in quality on large scale datasets, and current state-of-the-art LMs rely on word tokenization. It has been assumed that injecting the prior knowledge of a tokenizer into the model is essential to achieving competitive results. In this paper, we show that contrary to this conventional wisdom, tokenizer-free LMs with sufficient capacity can achieve competitive performance on a large scale dataset. We train a vanilla transformer network with 40 self-attention layers on the One Billion Word (lm1b) benchmark and achieve a new state of the art for tokenizer-free LMs, pushing these models to be on par with their word-based counterparts.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens

    cs.CL 2024-12 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A byte-level transformer that dynamically groups bytes into entropy-based patches matches token-based LLM performance at 8B scale and opens a new patch-size scaling axis for fixed inference cost.

  2. Hierarchical Autoregressive Transformers: Combining Byte- and Word-Level Processing for Robust, Adaptable Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A hierarchical byte-to-word-to-byte transformer matches subword-tokenizer LLMs at 1B-7B scale while being more robust to input corruption and faster to adapt to new languages.

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