arXiv Computation and Language

Removable and Irreducible: A Token-Cost Ledger for the Multilingual Tokenization Tax

arXiv AI
Oct 5

What Does a Token Cost? A Mixture-of-Agents Measurement of Sufficient Per-Token Compute

The paper introduces a Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) approach to quantify the per-token compute required by large language models. By having a panel of fifteen models of varying sizes attempt to reproduce each token, the authors define the smallest successful agent’s inference cost as the token’s sufficient compute, providing an upper bound on necessary computation. Experiments on benchmarks show that a 0.5B model can reproduce most tokens, and that the MoA-derived compute map can reduce latency in model routing and drafting tasks while improving or maintaining accuracy.

By Zhixu Du, Weijia Han, Hai Helen Li, Yiran Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

Measuring the Tokenization Premium: A Cost Audit for Underserved Language Communities

Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their underlying infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalent content can require substantially different token counts across languages, affecting API cost, latency, and usable context length before a model is invoked.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

In-Place Tokenizer Expansion for Pre-trained LLMs

arXiv:2607. 15232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A tokenizer fixed at the start of pre-training allocates vocabulary in proportion to the pre-training corpus, reflecting the deployment priorities at that time.

By Jimmy T. H. Smith, Tarek Dakhran, Alberto Cabrera, Simon S. Lee, Paul Pak, Aditya Tadimeti, Tim Seyde, Maxime Labonne, Alexander Amini, Mathias Lechner
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Objective vs. Search: Decomposing What Makes a Good Tokeniser

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