Learning Faster with Better Tokens: Parameter-Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation for Specialized Text Summarization

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Hauptverfasser: Balde, Gunjan, Roy, Soumyadeep, Mondal, Mainack, Ganguly, Niloy
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Balde, Gunjan
Roy, Soumyadeep
Mondal, Mainack
Ganguly, Niloy
author_facet Balde, Gunjan
Roy, Soumyadeep
Mondal, Mainack
Ganguly, Niloy
contents Large language models pretrained on general-domain corpora often exhibit tokenization inefficiencies when applied to specialized domains. Although continual pretraining for domain adaptation partially alleviate performance degradation, it does not resolve the fundamental vocabulary mismatch. To address this gap, we introduce a targeted parameter-efficient domain adaptation approach that combines vocabulary adaptation with pretraining for LLM-based text summarization. Our unified framework augments pretrained tokenizers with domain-specific tokens while selectively replacing under-trained and unreachable tokens to limit parameter growth. We evaluate our approach on Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen2.5-7B across legal and medical summarization tasks on a challenge-oriented evaluation protocol focused on expert-driven text and summaries which typically has higher concentration of over-fragmented Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. The vocabulary adaptation algorithm enhances the overall quality of the summarization model by improving semantic similarity between the generated summaries and their references. In addition, the adapted model produces summaries that incorporate more appropriate novel and domain-specific words, leading to improved coherence, relevance, and faithfulness. We further observe that our proposed approach significantly reduce training time by $35-55\%$ over continual pretraining and reduce parameter counts up to $37\%$ w.r.t expansion-only methods. We make the codebase publicly available at https://github.com/gb-kgp/VocabReplace-Then-Expand.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17379
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Faster with Better Tokens: Parameter-Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation for Specialized Text Summarization
Balde, Gunjan
Roy, Soumyadeep
Mondal, Mainack
Ganguly, Niloy
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models pretrained on general-domain corpora often exhibit tokenization inefficiencies when applied to specialized domains. Although continual pretraining for domain adaptation partially alleviate performance degradation, it does not resolve the fundamental vocabulary mismatch. To address this gap, we introduce a targeted parameter-efficient domain adaptation approach that combines vocabulary adaptation with pretraining for LLM-based text summarization. Our unified framework augments pretrained tokenizers with domain-specific tokens while selectively replacing under-trained and unreachable tokens to limit parameter growth. We evaluate our approach on Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen2.5-7B across legal and medical summarization tasks on a challenge-oriented evaluation protocol focused on expert-driven text and summaries which typically has higher concentration of over-fragmented Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. The vocabulary adaptation algorithm enhances the overall quality of the summarization model by improving semantic similarity between the generated summaries and their references. In addition, the adapted model produces summaries that incorporate more appropriate novel and domain-specific words, leading to improved coherence, relevance, and faithfulness. We further observe that our proposed approach significantly reduce training time by $35-55\%$ over continual pretraining and reduce parameter counts up to $37\%$ w.r.t expansion-only methods. We make the codebase publicly available at https://github.com/gb-kgp/VocabReplace-Then-Expand.
title Learning Faster with Better Tokens: Parameter-Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation for Specialized Text Summarization
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17379