Tokenisation via Convex Relaxations

Tokenisation is an integral part of the current NLP pipeline. Current tokenisation algorithms such as BPE and Unigram are greedy algorithms -- they make locally optimal decisions without considering the resulting vocabulary as a whole. We instead formulate tokeniser construction as a linear program and solve it using convex optimisation tools, yielding a new algorithm we call ConvexTok. We find ConvexTok consistently improves intrinsic tokenisation metrics and the bits-per-byte (BpB) achieved by language models; it also improves downstream task performance, but less consistently. Furthermore, ConvexTok allows the user to certify how far their tokeniser is from optimal, with respect to a certain objective, via a lower bound, and we empirically find it to be within 1\% of optimal at common vocabulary sizes.

Tokenisation over Bounded Alphabets is Hard

Recent works have shown that tokenisation is NP-complete. However, these works assume tokenisation is applied to inputs with unboundedly large alphabets -- an unrealistic assumption, given that in practice tokenisers operate over fixed-size alphabets, such as bytes or Unicode characters. We close this gap by analysing tokenisation over bounded $n$-ary alphabets, considering two natural variants: bottom-up tokenisation and direct tokenisation, where we must, respectively, select a sequence of merge operations or a vocabulary whose application optimally compresses a dataset. First, we note that proving hardness results for an $n$-ary alphabet proves the same results for alphabets of any larger size. We then prove that even with binary alphabets, both variants are not only NP-complete, but admit no polynomial-time approximation scheme (unless P=NP). We further show that direct tokenisation remains NP-complete even when applied to unary alphabets. While unary alphabets may not be practically useful, this result establishes that the computational intractability of tokenisation is not an artifact of large alphabets or complex constructions, but a fundamental barrier. Overall, our results explain why practical algorithms such as BPE and UnigramLM are heuristic, and points toward approximation algorithms being an important path going forward for tokenisation research.