GQ-VAE: A Novel Tokenizer for Language Models
Published:Dec 26, 2025 07:59
•1 min read
•ArXiv
Analysis
This paper introduces GQ-VAE, a novel architecture for learned neural tokenization that aims to replace existing tokenizers like BPE. The key advantage is its ability to learn variable-length discrete tokens, potentially improving compression and language modeling performance without requiring significant architectural changes to the underlying language model. The paper's significance lies in its potential to improve language model efficiency and performance by offering a drop-in replacement for existing tokenizers, especially at large scales.
Key Takeaways
- •Proposes GQ-VAE, a novel architecture for learned neural tokenization.
- •GQ-VAE learns variable-length discrete tokens.
- •Improves compression and language modeling performance compared to VQ-VAE.
- •Approaches BPE performance in compression and language modeling.
- •Offers a drop-in replacement for existing tokenizers.
Reference
“GQ-VAE improves compression and language modeling performance over a standard VQ-VAE tokenizer, and approaches the compression rate and language modeling performance of BPE.”