Byte Pair Encoding

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a subword tokenization algorithm initially designed for data compression, now widely used in natural language processing and increasingly applied to other modalities like symbolic music, molecular graphs, and images. Current research focuses on optimizing BPE for various data types, including exploring its effectiveness in multilingual settings and addressing issues like frequency imbalances and the optimal number of subword units for specific tasks. This adaptable technique significantly improves the handling of out-of-vocabulary words and enhances performance in diverse machine learning applications, from language modeling and machine translation to molecular generation and multimodal understanding.