arXiv:2607.26831cs.CL2026-07

不同语言的模型对非标准分词敏感度差异大,影响性能表现。

Language Models are not Equally Robust to Non-Canonical Tokenization across Languages

论文配图:Language Models are not Equally Robust to Non-Canonical Tokenization across Languages
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过多语言实验研究模型在非标准分词下的表现
  • 指令微调模型平均性能下降达23.7%(Llama-3.1-8B)
  • 多分词训练可有效缓解分词敏感问题

尽管给定字符串存在指数级多的合法分词方式,语言模型仅使用由分词器生成的单一标准序列,导致更广泛的分词空间未被充分研究。本文通过跨27种语言的多语言实验,考察了语言模型在非标准分词下的行为。针对英语已有研究显示模型对替代分词具有较强不变性,但本文发现该特性无法推广至其他语言。在六项下游任务中,指令微调模型在非标准分词下表现出显著性能波动:Llama-3.1-8B平均相对下降23.7%,Qwen3-8B下降11.4%,Gemma-3-12B下降9.9%。分词不变性随语言呈现系统性差异,分词碎片化程度高的语言对非标准分词更敏感。本研究揭示分词鲁棒性并非语言模型的普遍属性,而是强烈依赖于语言与分词器的交互关系。此外,基于多分词训练数据的LoRA微调能有效缓解敏感性,仅用英语数据微调即可提升跨语言鲁棒性,而系统采样多样化非标准分词则带来最佳整体性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Despite the existence of exponentially many valid tokenizations for a given string, language models operate on a single canonical sequence deterministically produced by the tokenizer, leaving the broader tokenization space largely uncharacterized. In this paper, we investigate this overlooked space by studying the behavior of language models under non-canonical tokenizations across diverse languages. For English, prior work shows that models are largely invariant to alternative tokenizations that represent the same underlying string. We ask whether this invariance generalizes to other languages beyond English. We conduct a multilingual study across 27 languages spanning diverse scripts and evaluate LLM behavior under alternative tokenizations across six downstream tasks. We find that tokenization invariance does not generalize: model behavior varies substantially across languages with instruction-tuned models exhibiting an average relative performance drop of 23.7% for Llama-3.1-8B, 11.4% for Qwen3-8B, and 9.9% for Gemma-3-12B. The variation of tokenization invariance is systematic across languages. Languages that exhibit higher token fragmentation show significantly greater sensitivity to non-canonical tokenizations. Our study of tokenization robustness serves as a diagnostic of how tightly a model is coupled to its tokenizer. These results demonstrate that tokenization robustness is not a universal property of language models, but depends strongly on the language and its interaction with the tokenizer. We also show that LoRA fine-tuning with multi-tokenization training data provides an effective mitigation for tokenization sensitivity. Fine-tuning on English alone improves tokenization robustness across languages, while systematically sampling diverse non-canonical tokenizations achieves the strongest overall performance.

分词鲁棒性多语言模型LoRA微调语言差异

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