The paper shows that HuggingFace’s ByteLevel pre‑tokenizer, which treats a word as a sequence of Unicode letters, splits abugida scripts at every vowel sign, creating a training‑free lower bound on tokenizer fertility. Across 26 languages, all 17 abugidas exhibit increased token counts (up to 9×), while Latin, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Han remain unchanged. The authors demonstrate that correcting the character class reduces Nepali token counts, improves model performance, and that this issue is widespread in popular HuggingFace models.
By Sajal Regmi, Siddhartha Pudasaini, Chetan Phakami Pun
The paper introduces Universal Byte-Level Encoding (UBE), a dual‑alphabet tokenizer that routes 3‑4‑byte UTF‑8 characters through UTF‑16 while keeping 1‑2‑byte characters on the UTF‑8 path. This design lowers the worst‑case token‑budget disparity for high‑premium scripts without increasing costs for efficient English spans, and it preserves standard BPE merges and exact decoding. In extensive Unicode audits and multilingual language‑model experiments, UBE matches or improves token‑count efficiency and context usability compared to traditional byte‑pair encoding.
By Hyunsik Kim, Youngmoon Jung
arXiv:2606. 00613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Watermarking should identify language-model output without degrading quality or limiting verification to the model provider.
By Shinwoo Park, Hyejin Park, Hyeseon An, Yo-Sub Han
arXiv:2609.00378v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models pay a well-documented tax on non-English text: the same content costs several times more tokens, and because attention is quadrat...
By Madhulatha Mandarapu, Sandeep Kunkunuru
arXiv:2609.12960v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sanskrit fuses case, number, person and tense into word endings and chains clauses into compounds, so it is information-dense per word. Whether that de...
By Devansh Sharma
arXiv:2608. 20047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Watermarking schemes for large language model output are evaluated almost exclusively on English text using each scheme's detection threshold and a narrow set of quality measurements.
By Alexander Nemecek, Osama Zafar, Debargha Ganguly, Vikash Singh, Vipin Chaudhary, Erman Ayday
arXiv:2608.21384v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern multilingual tokenizers often fragment Ukrainian and other underrepresented Cyrillic-script languages more heavily than English, creating disp...
By Ivan Dobrovolskyi
Watermarking schemes for large language model output are evaluated almost exclusively on English text using each scheme's detection threshold and a narrow set of quality measurements. Multilingual deployment exposes evaluation-design choices that are inconsequential on English but determine conclusions cross-lingually.
arXiv:2607. 24276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words.
By Priyansh Srivastava
arXiv:2609.39001v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: LLM services are billed per token and context windows are measured in tokens, yet the number of tokens needed for the same content varies across lang...
By Thomas Serval
Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words. Because these tokenizers are trained predominantly on English-centric corpora, they introduce a systematic and often overlooked disadvantage for many non-English languages.
The paper introduces two new tokenisation algorithms—BottomUpLL and TopDownComp—to systematically explore the 2x2 design space defined by optimisation objective (compression vs. log‑likelihood) and search procedure (bottom‑up merging vs. top‑down pruning). Experiments across model sizes, vocabularies, and domains show that the search procedure, rather than the objective, consistently yields lower bits‑per‑byte, while no clear pattern emerges on the BLiMP benchmark. These findings clarify how tokeniser design choices influence language‑model performance and provide guidance for constructing tokenisers more principledly.
By Ahmetcan Yavuz, Clara Meister, Tiago Pimentel