Daily Papers

Large language models route every input through a learned embedding table of shape |V| x d_model, consuming hundreds of millions to billions of trainable parameters at frontier scale. We introduce Kronecker Embeddings, a deterministic byte-level character-position factorization that replaces this table with a fixed encoder and a single learned projection, compatible with standard BPE tokenizers, eliminating 91--94% of input-side trainable parameters at frontier scale. We provide five contributions. First, a cross-model probe across six LMs (135M-671B parameters) shows trained input embeddings cluster typographic variants of the probe word far more than morphological relatives; Kronecker escapes this clustering at the embedding layer. Second, a controlled three-seed comparison on nanoGPT GPT-2 124M over 2.5B tokens of FineWeb-Edu shows Kronecker reaching 2.5 +- 0.2% lower validation loss than the BPE-tied baseline (gap 0.083 +- 0.007 nats, ~9% lower perplexity), needing ~1.43x fewer steps to reach BPE's converged loss. Third, a spelling-robustness probe over 110 clean/typo pairs shows Kronecker preserves the top-1 prediction on 55.5% of pairs vs. 47.3% for BPE (+8.2 pp) and lowers KL by 7.6%, winning or tying in 10 of 11 categories; a generation probe shows Kronecker echoes byte-novel strings and typos through generation where BPE forgets them. Fourth, BPE embedding norm drifts during training while Kronecker projection norm stays near 1.0, consistent with a stable representational target. Fifth, an on-the-fly runtime variant reconstructs embeddings from a 4.5 MB byte buffer rather than a 2.15 GB table at vocabulary 131,072, with 0.01--0.24% step-time overhead. Byte-level locality has a tradeoff: byte-similar but semantically distant pairs (compute/commute, nation/notion) cluster together, shifting disambiguation to early attention layers.

Current state-of-the-art models for natural language understanding require a preprocessing step to convert raw text into discrete tokens. This process known as tokenization relies on a pre-built vocabulary of words or sub-word morphemes. This fixed vocabulary limits the model's robustness to spelling errors and its capacity to adapt to new domains. In this work, we introduce a novel open-vocabulary language model that adopts a hierarchical two-level approach: one at the word level and another at the sequence level. Concretely, we design an intra-word module that uses a shallow Transformer architecture to learn word representations from their characters, and a deep inter-word Transformer module that contextualizes each word representation by attending to the entire word sequence. Our model thus directly operates on character sequences with explicit awareness of word boundaries, but without biased sub-word or word-level vocabulary. Experiments on various downstream tasks show that our method outperforms strong baselines. We also demonstrate that our hierarchical model is robust to textual corruption and domain shift.

Tokenization is a central component of natural language processing in current large language models (LLMs), enabling models to convert raw text into processable units. Although learned tokenizers are widely adopted, they exhibit notable limitations, including their large, fixed vocabulary sizes and poor adaptability to new domains or languages. We present a family of models with up to 70 billion parameters based on the hierarchical autoregressive transformer (HAT) architecture. In HAT, an encoder transformer aggregates bytes into word embeddings and then feeds them to the backbone, a classical autoregressive transformer. The outputs of the backbone are then cross-attended by the decoder and converted back into bytes. We show that we can reuse available pre-trained models by converting the Llama 3.1 8B and 70B models into the HAT architecture: Llama-3.1-8B-TFree-HAT and Llama-3.1-70B-TFree-HAT are byte-level models whose encoder and decoder are trained from scratch, but where we adapt the pre-trained Llama backbone, i.e., the transformer blocks with the embedding matrix and head removed, to handle word embeddings instead of the original tokens. We also provide a 7B HAT model, Llama-TFree-HAT-Pretrained, trained entirely from scratch on nearly 4 trillion words. The HAT architecture improves text compression by reducing the number of required sequence positions and enhances robustness to intra-word variations, e.g., spelling differences. Through pre-training, as well as subsequent supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization in English and German, we show strong proficiency in both languages, improving on the original Llama 3.1 in most benchmarks. We release our models (including 200 pre-training checkpoints) on Hugging Face.