对比多种分词器,发现公平与效率可兼得
Equity with Efficiency: An Empirical Study of Tokenizers for Multilingual Large Language Models

- 提出三种公平分词方法,平衡效率与多语言公平性
- 帕里蒂感知BPE在压缩率和跨语言公平性上表现最优
- 适合关注多语言模型公平性的研究者与开发者
多语言大模型依赖子词分词将离散文本映射为连续神经表示。当前主流的字节级字对编码(BPE)分词器对高资源语言和拉丁文字有结构偏好,导致东南亚等低资源语言使用者面临推理成本上升和跨语言能力差距扩大。本文首次在涵盖11种东南亚语言的统一基准上系统比较了公平分词器。除分词器层面的压缩效率与跨语言公平性分析外,还通过使用相同训练数据的15亿参数语言模型训练评估下游任务性能。结果表明,帕里蒂感知BPE处于效率-公平权衡的帕累托前沿,实现优异压缩公平性且成本可控;形态驱动字节编码凭借更丰富的形态表示获得最佳语义推理性能,但计算开销更高;字节潜在变换器在下游任务中表现不佳,可能因其架构假设与有限低资源训练数据不匹配。研究证明跨语言公平性与分词效率并非不可调和,为设计公平多语言模型提供实践指导。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multilingual large language models (LLMs) depend on subword tokenization to bridge discrete text and continuous neural representation. State-of-the-art multilingual LLMs often use Byte-level Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers that structurally favor high-resource languages and Latin scripts. For speakers of underrepresented languages, particularly those across Southeast Asia, this bias inflates inference costs and widens cross-lingual capability gaps. We present the first systematic comparison of equitable tokenizers on a unified benchmark spanning 11 Southeast Asian languages. Beyond tokenizer-level analysis of compression efficiency and cross-lingual equity, we assess downstream task performance through controlled 1.5B-parameter language model training using the same training data. Our results show that Parity-aware BPE lies on the Pareto frontier of the efficiency-equity trade-off, achieving strong compression parity at competitive cost. Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding delivers the best semantic reasoning performance through morphologically richer representations, albeit at a higher computational expense. Byte Latent Transformer underperforms on downstream tasks, possibly because its architectural assumptions misalign with the constraints of limited low-resource training data. Together, our findings demonstrate that cross-lingual fairness and tokenization efficiency are not fundamentally at odds, and offer practical guidance for designing equitable multilingual models.
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