Adapting Language Models via Token Translation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feng, Zhili, Marwah, Tanya, Fusi, Nicolo, Alvarez-Melis, David, Mackey, Lester
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909378852945920
author Feng, Zhili
Marwah, Tanya
Fusi, Nicolo
Alvarez-Melis, David
Mackey, Lester
author_facet Feng, Zhili
Marwah, Tanya
Fusi, Nicolo
Alvarez-Melis, David
Mackey, Lester
contents Modern large language models use a fixed tokenizer to effectively compress text drawn from a source domain. However, applying the same tokenizer to a new target domain often leads to inferior compression, more costly inference, and reduced semantic alignment. To address this deficiency, we introduce Sparse Sinkhorn Token Translation (S2T2). S2T2 trains a tailored tokenizer for the target domain and learns to translate between target and source tokens, enabling more effective reuse of the pre-trained next-source-token predictor. In our experiments with finetuned English language models, S2T2 improves both the perplexity and the compression of out-of-domain protein sequences, outperforming direct finetuning with either the source or target tokenizer. In addition, we find that token translations learned for smaller, less expensive models can be directly transferred to larger, more powerful models to reap the benefits of S2T2 at lower cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00593
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting Language Models via Token Translation
Feng, Zhili
Marwah, Tanya
Fusi, Nicolo
Alvarez-Melis, David
Mackey, Lester
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Modern large language models use a fixed tokenizer to effectively compress text drawn from a source domain. However, applying the same tokenizer to a new target domain often leads to inferior compression, more costly inference, and reduced semantic alignment. To address this deficiency, we introduce Sparse Sinkhorn Token Translation (S2T2). S2T2 trains a tailored tokenizer for the target domain and learns to translate between target and source tokens, enabling more effective reuse of the pre-trained next-source-token predictor. In our experiments with finetuned English language models, S2T2 improves both the perplexity and the compression of out-of-domain protein sequences, outperforming direct finetuning with either the source or target tokenizer. In addition, we find that token translations learned for smaller, less expensive models can be directly transferred to larger, more powerful models to reap the benefits of S2T2 at lower cost.
title Adapting Language Models via Token Translation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00593