Vocabulary Customization for Efficient Domain-Specific LLM Deployment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Herold, Christian, Kozielski, Michael, Santavas, Nicholas, Versley, Yannick, Khadivi, Shahram
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Herold, Christian
Kozielski, Michael
Santavas, Nicholas
Versley, Yannick
Khadivi, Shahram
author_facet Herold, Christian
Kozielski, Michael
Santavas, Nicholas
Versley, Yannick
Khadivi, Shahram
contents When using an LLM to process text outside the training domain(s), an often overlooked factor is vocabulary mismatch, where the general-domain tokenizer fails to capture frequent domain-specific terms, leading to higher token fertility and thus a decrease in processing speed due to suboptimal sub-word splits. We address this limitation by augmenting the pretrained vocabulary with a set of domain-specific tokens. To this end, we design an algorithm that extends an existing tokenizer while guaranteeing it never decreases tokenization efficiency: every input sequence is segmented into at most the same number of tokens as before. Evaluated on real-world e-Commerce use-cases, the augmented tokenizer significantly shortens input sequences by up to 20% and reduces inference latency on downstream tasks while preserving predictive quality. We further analyze secondary effects, such as the impact on forward pass speed and the rate at which the model adopts the newly introduced tokens, to illustrate the broader benefits of vocabulary adaptation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_26124
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vocabulary Customization for Efficient Domain-Specific LLM Deployment
Herold, Christian
Kozielski, Michael
Santavas, Nicholas
Versley, Yannick
Khadivi, Shahram
Computation and Language
When using an LLM to process text outside the training domain(s), an often overlooked factor is vocabulary mismatch, where the general-domain tokenizer fails to capture frequent domain-specific terms, leading to higher token fertility and thus a decrease in processing speed due to suboptimal sub-word splits. We address this limitation by augmenting the pretrained vocabulary with a set of domain-specific tokens. To this end, we design an algorithm that extends an existing tokenizer while guaranteeing it never decreases tokenization efficiency: every input sequence is segmented into at most the same number of tokens as before. Evaluated on real-world e-Commerce use-cases, the augmented tokenizer significantly shortens input sequences by up to 20% and reduces inference latency on downstream tasks while preserving predictive quality. We further analyze secondary effects, such as the impact on forward pass speed and the rate at which the model adopts the newly introduced tokens, to illustrate the broader benefits of vocabulary adaptation.
title Vocabulary Customization for Efficient Domain-Specific LLM Deployment
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26124