arXiv Computation and Language By Christos Koutsiaris

Nested Byte-Level Vocabularies Are Cheap to Deploy and Expensive to Share: A Pre-Registered Negative Result

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The paper demonstrates that a byte‑level BPE tokenizer can be sliced to create multiple vocabulary sizes from a single trained model, preserving exact logits while reducing deployed weights by 66%. Experiments on 30 models show that while sliced models match the full model numerically, they underperform fixed‑cap specialists by a few percentage points in bits‑per‑byte. Multi‑cap training improves robustness to typographical noise, suggesting benefits from training across multiple granularities rather than from control tokens alone.

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