arXiv AI

Mimir: Large-scale Multilingual Concept Modeling

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

To Each Language Its Tokenizer: Modular Tokenizers for Efficient Multilingual LLMs

The paper proposes a modular tokenizer framework for multilingual large language models, allowing the creation of language‑specific subtokenizers that match monolingual compression quality. It introduces a pretraining strategy that samples these subtokenizers to limit predictions to relevant vocabularies, enabling efficient training and inference. This approach reduces memory usage and speeds up inference without compromising performance.

By Franck Signe, Hippolyte Pilchen, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon, \'Edouard Grave
arXiv AI
Oct 27

Conceptizer: Next-Token Prediction Is Not All You Need

Conceptizer is a training framework that augments next-token prediction with a reward for meaning by using a fixed vocabulary of about 9,000 concepts derived from contextual synonyms. It maps each token distribution to a concept distribution, sharing the reward for the target meaning across its possible wordings, thereby providing a concept-level training signal without adding model parameters. Applied to 1B–8B parameter models, Conceptizer achieves lower perplexity at concept-target positions, assigns higher probability to contextual synonyms, and improves downstream performance on knowledge and sentiment tasks while remaining comparable on commonsense tasks.

By Haoran Zheng, Chen Shani
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

No Single Tokenizer Feature Reliably Predicts Downstream Language Model Performance

The paper investigates whether intrinsic tokenizer features can predict the performance of downstream language models. By training about 200 models across nine languages and evaluating numerous tokenizer metrics, the authors find that none of the existing metrics consistently forecasts model performance across different families, tasks, and languages. They propose a new linguistically grounded metric that captures aspects of tokenizer quality missed by prior measures, though its predictive power may still vary.

By Antonio Lopardo, Luis Frentzen Salim, Shikhar Srivastava, Kevin Jiang, Mridul Sharma, Catherine Arnett
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Rebalancing Token Importance in Language Models with TF-IDF Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss

The paper proposes an information-weighted cross‑entropy loss that rescales token contributions using TF‑IDF statistics, thereby emphasizing semantically informative tokens and down‑weighting ubiquitous ones. Experiments on five decoder‑only language models (1.1B–13B parameters) show consistent reductions in memorized substring length while maintaining perplexity and downstream performance. The method is architecture‑agnostic, adds less than 3% computational overhead, and can be integrated into existing training pipelines.

By Zhijian Li, Stefan Larson, Kevin Leach