Model-Aware Tokenizer Transfer
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to support an increasing number of languages, yet their predefined tokenizers remain a bottleneck for adapting models to lower-resource or distinct-script languages. Existing tokenizer transfer methods typically rely on semantic heuristics to initialize new embeddings, ignoring higher-layer model dynamics and limiting transfer quality. We propose Model-Aware Tokenizer Transfer (MATT), a method that incorporates model internals into the tokenizer transfer process. MATT introduces an Attention Influence Modeling (AIM) objective that distills inter-token communication patterns from a source model into a target model with a new tokenizer, providing an efficient warm-up before standard language modeling. Unlike approaches that focus solely on embedding similarity, MATT leverages attention behavior to guide embedding initialization and adaptation. Experiments across diverse linguistic settings show that MATT recovers a large fraction of the original model's performance within a few GPU hours, outperforming heuristic baselines. These results demonstrate that incorporating model-level signals offers a practical and effective path toward robust tokenizer transfer in multilingual LLMs.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Protocol-Aware Tokenization and Architecture Co-Design for Wireless Packet Foundation Models
What matters more for building foundation models for wireless packet traces: the tokenizer or the architecture or both? To answer this question, we build on PLUME Anonymous [2026], which introduced protocol-aware tokeniz…
Cross-Tokenizer Distillation via Approximate Likelihood Matching
Distillation has shown remarkable success in transferring knowledge from a Large Language Model (LLM) teacher to a student LLM. However, current distillation methods predominantly require the same tokenizer between the t…
Large Language ModelWriting-System-Level Tokenizer Adaptation for Byte-Level BPE
Pretrained byte-level BPE tokenizers can segment underrepresented languages inefficiently. Replacing a tokenizer changes the meaning of nearly every token ID, while vocabulary expansion enlarges the model's embedding and…
InsightTok: Improving Text and Face Fidelity in Discrete Tokenization for Autoregressive Image Generation
Text and faces are among the most perceptually salient and practically important patterns in visual generation, yet they remain challenging for autoregressive generators built on discrete tokenization. A central bottlene…
Image GenerationZero-Shot Tokenizer Transfer
Language models (LMs) are bound to their tokenizer, which maps raw text to a sequence of vocabulary items (tokens). This restricts their flexibility: for example, LMs trained primarily on English may still perform well i…
XLM-R