Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens (Paper Explained)

#tokenization #llm #meta This paper does away with tokenization and creates an LLM architecture that operates on dynamically sized "patches" instead of tokens. By controlling the patch size, they gain a level of control over the tradeoff between model size and FLOPs and use that to achieve more favorable scaling behavior than classically tokenized LLMs. Paper: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/byte-latent-transformer-patches-scale-better-than-tokens/ Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/blt Abstract: We introduce the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT), a new byte-level LLM architecture that, for the first time, matches tokenization-based LLM performance at scale with significant improvements in inference efficiency and robustness. BLT encodes bytes into dynamically sized patches, which serve as the primary units of computation. Patches are segmented dynamically based on the entropy of the next byte, allocating more compute and model capacity where increased data complexity dema