arXiv:2601.21768cs.CL2026-01

用可微分分词和概率注意力,让语言模型自动生成合理文本边界。

Zonkey: A Hierarchical Diffusion Language Model with Differentiable Tokenization and Probabilistic Attention

  • 通过可微分分词器自动学习词句边界,无需人工标注
  • 支持变长生成,用概率衰减替代结束符,提升灵活性
  • 适合追求端到端训练、领域适配的生成任务研究者

大型语言模型虽已革新自然语言处理,但受限于固定、不可微的分词器(如BPE),难以实现端到端优化及对噪声或特定领域数据的适应。本文提出Zonkey,一种分层扩散语言模型,从原始字符到文档级表征实现全可训练流程。核心是可微分分词器(段落分割器),通过学习概率性起始标记决策,自动涌现出语义合理的切分(如空格处为词界,句号处为句首),无需显式监督。其可微性由新型概率注意力机制支持,通过位置特异性存在概率模拟无限序列的软掩码,同时保留梯度。序列以概率方式衰减,不依赖结束符,支持变长输出。分层结构将序列压缩为高阶抽象(如字符n-gram转为类词向量,再转为类句向量),并通过去噪扩散混合模型(DDMM)在隐空间实现稳定高效去噪。缝合器(Stitcher)确保片段间重叠不变性。在Wikipedia上端到端训练后,Zonkey能从噪声生成连贯、变长文本,展现出涌现的层次结构,且与数据分布有良好定性一致性。该方法推动全梯度语言模型发展,具有更强领域适应性和可扩展生成潜力。源码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet they remain constrained by fixed, non-differentiable tokenizers like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which hinder end-to-end optimization and adaptability to noisy or domain-specific data. We introduce Zonkey, a hierarchical diffusion model that addresses these limitations through a fully trainable pipeline from raw characters to document-level representations. At its core is a differentiable tokenizer (Segment Splitter) that learns probabilistic beginning-of-sequence (BOS) decisions, enabling adaptive splits that emerge as linguistically meaningful (e.g., word boundaries at spaces, sentence starts at periods) without explicit supervision. This differentiability is enabled by our novel Probabilistic Attention mechanism, which incorporates position-specific existence probabilities to simulate soft masking over theoretically infinite sequences while preserving gradients. Sequences decay probabilistically rather than relying on end-of-sequence tokens, supporting variable-length outputs. Hierarchical levels compress sequences into higher abstractions (e.g., character n-grams to word-like vectors, then sentence-like), with reconstruction via our Denoising Diffusion Mixed Model (DDMM) for stable and efficient denoising in latent space. A Stitcher ensures overlap invariance across segments. Trained end-to-end on Wikipedia, Zonkey generates coherent, variable-length text from noise, demonstrating emergent hierarchies and promising qualitative alignment to data distributions compared to entropy-based learnable tokenizers. Our approach advances toward fully gradient-based LLMs, with potential for better domain adaptation and scalable generation. We release the source code for training and reproducing our experiments.

扩散模型可微分分词生成模型

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