Trainable input embedding tables are a standard component of modern language models. We ask whether they are actually necessary at the input interface. For a vocabulary of size
V, exact token identity requires only
K=⌈log2V⌉ bits. We replace the usual trainable
V×dmodel input embedding matrix with fixed minimal binary token codes and a zero-parameter lift to model width. In our main setting,
V=65,536, so
K=16, and tokens are represented by fixed 16-dimensional binary codes tiled to
dmodel=1024. We also evaluate a fully table-free variant in which codes are generated from token IDs on the fly and randomly recoded by an invertible affine transform over
F2K. Across matched 32-layer decoder-only models trained on approximately 17B tokens and evaluated over three independent training seeds, fixed minimal codes achieve comparable held-out validation perplexity to a standard learned-input baseline while removing 67.1M trainable input parameters. The fixed-code runs have a lower mean validation perplexity in our experiments, 2.36 versus 2.44, but the observed gap is within the measured seed-to-seed variation of 4.8%; we therefore interpret the result as evidence that the trainable input table is not necessary, rather than as a statistically resolved superiority claim. The table-free affine-recoded variant remains close at 2.39 despite a slightly shorter training run. These results show that, in this regime, a trainable input embedding table is not necessary for useful language modeling. The output projection remains standard and trainable.
A. Bochkov