大词汇量提升模型性能,本质是降低文本编码复杂度。
Exploiting Vocabulary Frequency Imbalance in Language Model Pre-training
- 通过控制变量实验发现,词表扩大主要减少高频词的编码不确定性。
- 2500个最常用词占下游任务75%的词元,其训练收益直接传递。
- 词表大小并非关键,降低文本编码复杂度才是核心机制。
大型语言模型使用分词器进行训练,导致词元分布严重不均衡:少数词频繁出现,多数词极少出现。尽管当前趋势是不断扩大词表,但其优势来源尚不明确。为此,我们开展受控研究,将模型词表从24K逐步扩大至196K,同时保持数据、计算量和优化策略不变。我们首先量化了分词后文本的复杂性(以柯尔莫哥洛夫复杂度衡量),发现更大的词表能有效降低该复杂性。当词表超过24K后,所有常见词均已作为单个词元存在,继续扩大词表只会加剧词元频率的相对不平衡。词级损失分解显示,更大的词表几乎仅通过降低前2500个最常见词的交叉熵损失来提升性能,尽管稀有词的损失反而上升。而这些高频词在下游任务中约占75%的词元,因此其训练优势得以完整保留。进一步实验表明,固定词表规模仅扩大模型参数也能获得类似优势。我们的结果将‘更大词表有益’重新解释为‘降低分词后文本的复杂性有益’,为分词器与模型协同设计提供了简洁且原则性的调节手段,并澄清了预训练中语言模型扩展的损失动态。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models are trained with tokenizers, and the resulting token distribution is highly imbalanced: a few words dominate the stream while most occur rarely. Recent practice favors ever-larger vocabularies, but it is unclear where the benefit comes from. To this end, we perform a controlled study that scales the vocabulary of the language model from 24K to 196K while holding data, computation, and optimization unchanged. We begin by quantifying the complexity of tokenized text -- formalized via Kolmogorov complexity -- and show that larger vocabularies reduce this complexity. Above 24K, every common word is already tokenized as a single token, so enlarging vocabulary only deepens the relative token-frequency imbalance. Word-level loss decomposition shows that larger vocabularies reduce cross-entropy loss almost exclusively by lowering uncertainty on the 2,500 most frequent words, even though loss on the rare tail rises. The same frequent words cover roughly 75% of tokens in downstream benchmarks, so this training advantage transfers intact. We further show that enlarging model parameters with a fixed vocabulary yields the same frequent-word benefit. Our results recast "bigger vocabularies help" as "lowering complexity of tokenized text helps," offering a simple, principled knob for tokenizer-model co-design and clarifying the loss dynamics that govern language model scaling in pre-training.
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