{"paper":{"title":"Exact Byte-Level Probabilities from Tokenized Language Models for FIM-Tasks and Model Ensembles","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Brandon Amos, Buu Phan, Itai Gat, Karen Ullrich, Marton Havasi, Matthew Muckley","submitted_at":"2024-10-11T23:30:42Z","abstract_excerpt":"Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing and comparing the stochastic behavior of tokenized models with their byte-level, or token-free, counterparts. We discover that, even when the two models are statistically equivalent, their predictive distributions over the next byte can be substantially different, a phenomenon we term as ``tokenization bias''. To fully characterize this phenomenon, we introdu"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2410.09303","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2410.09303/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}