| Challenge: | Tokenizer transfer allows training a model for low-resource languages without full retraining . a study of pre-trained tokenizers shows that they are more efficient than traditional training methods. |
| Approach: | They evaluate tokenizer transfer on models trained on language-specific corpora, Orthogonal Mapping Pursuit and Fast Vocabulary Transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts to a pre-trained model without full retraining and improves cross-lingual applicability. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to building monolingual models for low-resource languages require a full model tuning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular approach to build monolingual models for low-resource languages by finetuning the whole model on the target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on natural language understanding tasks on Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Quechua with Quechuan being a very low-resource language. |
Evaluating Tokenizer Adaptation Methods for Large Language Models on Low-Resource Programming Languages (2025.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) trained on high-resource programming languages perform sub-optimally for low-resourced programming languages (LRPLs). |
| Approach: | They evaluate the impact of tokenizer adaptation methods on improving code generation for LRPLs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the original models and fine-tuned models in LRPLs, but performance declines in non-target languages like Python after tokenizer adaptation. |
How Good is Your Tokenizer? On the Monolingual Performance of Multilingual Language Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using pretraining data, we find that a designated monolingual tokenizer plays an equally important role in the downstream performance of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare pretrained multilingual models with their monolingual counterparts on a set of five diverse monolingual downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models offer previously unmatched performance in all NLP tasks. |
Tokenizer-Aware Cross-Lingual Adaptation of Decoder-Only LLMs through Embedding Relearning and Swapping (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been primarily focused on English, leaving the multilingual ability unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that creates new tokenizers and tunes embeddings on fixed model weights for target language adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is light-weight and performant but has limitations for older models and high resource languages. |
Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial? (2024.findings-naacl)
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Mehdi Ali, Michael Fromm, Klaudia Thellmann, Richard Rutmann, Max Lübbering, Johannes Leveling, Katrin Klug, Jan Ebert, Niclas Doll, Jasper Buschhoff, Charvi Jain, Alexander Weber, Lena Jurkschat, Hammam Abdelwahab, Chelsea John, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Malte Ostendorff, Samuel Weinbach, Rafet Sifa, Stefan Kesselheim, Nicolas Flores-Herr
| Challenge: | Recent success of large language models has been driven by curating the training dataset composition, scaling of model architectures and advancements in pretraining objectives, leaving tokenizer influence as a blind spot. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive study on the influence of tokenizer choice on LLM downstream performance by training 24 mono- and multilingual LLMs at a 2.6B parameter scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly impact the model's downstream performance and training costs. |
One Tokenizer To Rule Them All: Emergent Language Plasticity via Multilingual Tokenizers (2026.acl-long)
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Diana Abagyan, Alejandro R. Salamanca, Andres Felipe Cruz-Salinas, Kris Cao, Hangyu Lin, Acyr Locatelli, Marzieh Fadaee, Ahmet Üstün, Sara Hooker
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train multilingual large language models for many languages at once are limited due to limited model capacity, scarce high-quality data, and compute constraints. |
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AdaptBPE: From General Purpose to Specialized Tokenizers (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Subword tokenization methods impact performance and efficiency of large language models . generic tokens can incur inefficiencies when applying the model to specific domains or languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a subword tokenization technique that selectively replaces low-utility tokens with more relevant ones based on their frequency in an adaptation corpus. |
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Mini-Model Adaptation: Efficiently Extending Pretrained Models to New Languages via Aligned Shallow Training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pretrain Masked Language Models (MLMs) are expensive and require a full forward and backward pass over the entire model. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a shallow mini-model from a fraction of a large model's parameters and plug it into a larger model for rapid cross-lingual transfer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on XNLI, MLQA and PAWS-X show that mini-model adaptation matches the standard approach using up to 2.3x less compute on average. |
UNKs Everywhere: Adapting Multilingual Language Models to New Scripts (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Massively multilingual language models offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks, but there is a profound performance gap between resource-rich and resource-poor target languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of data-efficient methods that enable quick and effective adaptation of pretrained multilingual models to low-resource languages and unseen scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve learning of the new dedicated embedding matrix in the target language and for low-resource languages written in unseen scripts. |
MonoByte: A Pool of Monolingual Byte-level Language Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that multilingual models can achieve zero-shot cross-lingual performance on various NLP tasks, but due to the cost of pretraining, they often use public models with limited budgets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use tokenized models to test cross-lingual ability in multilingual and monolingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The results show that models pretrained on multilingual and even monolingual corpora perform better than models pre-trained on SOTA models. |