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Over-Tokenized Transformer: Vocabulary Is Generally Worth Scaling (arxiv.org)
2 points by famouswaffles on Feb 4, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of using one word list for both reading and writing, this design lets the reading side use a much bigger list of multi-word chunks. Training errors fell steadily as that list grew, matching a model twice the size at no extra cost.

Abstract · Over-Tokenized Transformer: Vocabulary is Generally Worth Scaling

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 input and output vocabularies to improve language modeling performance. Specifically, our approach scales up input vocabularies to leverage multi-gram tokens. Through extensive experiments, we uncover a log-linear relationship between input vocabulary size and training loss, demonstrating that larger input vocabularies consistently enhance model performance, regardless of model size. Using a large input vocabulary, we achieve performance comparable to double-sized baselines with no additional cost. Our findings highlight the importance of tokenization in scaling laws and provide practical insight for tokenizer design, paving the way for more efficient and powerful LLMs.

Hongzhi Huang, Defa Zhu, Banggu Wu, Yutao Zeng, Ya Wang, Qiyang Min, Xun Zhou
arXiv:2501.16975 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Jan 28, 2025 · updated May 23, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · accepted by ICML2025

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