arXiv:2608.15080cs.CL2026-08

用自回归模型预删可预测字节,让文本编码更高效

A Pilot Study of Autocompleting Tokenizers

论文配图:A Pilot Study of Autocompleting Tokenizers
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用轻量自回归模型预判并移除上下文可预测的字节
  • 英法翻译中序列长度减少近1/3,质量不变
  • 跨语言通用,压缩比0.47~0.67,适合长序列任务

现代输入法常通过自动补全省略可由上下文恢复的信息。受此启发,我们探索是否可对Transformer输入进行类似压缩。字节级分词虽语言无关且简单,但序列过长导致计算开销大、模型性能下降。本文提出一种压缩方案:先用轻量级自回归字节语言模型识别并删除周围上下文可预测的字节,再将压缩后的表示输入标准编码器-解码器Transformer。机器翻译实验表明,大量源语言字节可被省略而不影响翻译质量。在英法翻译任务中,最优方法在保留翻译性能的同时将源序列长度减少近三分之一。芬兰语-英语、俄语-英语和中文-英语任务上的额外实验显示,该方法在多种书写系统与形态类型间具有泛化能力,压缩比介于0.47至0.67之间,翻译质量相当或更优。结果表明,许多输入字节足够可预测,可隐式表示而非显式存储,为字节级模型提供了简单的序列长度优化机制。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Modern input methods routinely rely on autocomplete to omit information that can be recovered from local context. Inspired by these autocomplete-assisted writing systems, we investigate whether Transformer inputs can be compressed in a similar manner. Byte-level tokenization offers a simple and language-independent alternative to subword tokenization, but its longer input sequences typically result in increased computational cost and reduced model quality. We propose a compression scheme that employs a lightweight autoregressive byte language model to identify and remove bytes that are easily predictable from their surrounding context before Transformer processing. The resulting compressed representation is then provided as input to a standard encoder--decoder Transformer. Experiments on machine translation show that a substantial fraction of source-language bytes can be omitted without degrading translation quality. On English--French, our best method preserves translation performance while reducing source sequence length by nearly one-third. Additional experiments on Finnish--English, Russian--English, and Chinese--English demonstrate that the approach generalizes across diverse writing systems and morphological typologies, yielding comparable or improved translation quality at compression ratios between 0.47 and 0.67. These findings suggest that many input bytes are predictable enough to be represented implicitly rather than explicitly, providing a simple mechanism for reducing the sequence-length overhead associated with byte-level models.

压缩编码字节分词Transformer

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