Faster Superword Tokenization
Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a widely used tokenization algorithm, whose tokens cannot extend across pre-tokenization boundaries, functionally limiting it to representing at most full words. The BoundlessBPE and SuperBPE algorithms extend and improve BPE by relaxing this limitation and allowing the formation of superwords, which are combinations of pretokens that form phrases. However, previous implementations were impractical to train: for example, BoundlessBPE took 4.7 CPU days to train on 1GB of data. We show that supermerge candidates, two or more consecutive pretokens eligible to form a supermerge, can be aggregated by frequency much like regular pretokens. This avoids keeping full do...
| Authors | Craig W. Schmidt, Chris Tanner, Yuval Pinter |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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