A Pilot Study of Autocompleting Tokenizers

[2608.15080] A Pilot Study of Autocompleting Tokenizers Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Search arXiv Press Enter to search · Advanced search Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2608.15080 (cs) [Submitted on 15 Aug 2026] Title: A Pilot Study of Autocompleting Tokenizers Authors: Samuel Wexler , Mark Hopkins View a PDF of the paper titled A Pilot Study of Autocompleting Tokenizers, by Samuel Wexler and Mark Hopkins View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: Modern input methods routinely rely on autocomplete to omit information that can be recovered from local context. Inspired by these autocomplete-assisted writing systems, we investigate whether Transformer inputs can be compressed in a similar manner. Byte-level tokenization offers a simple and language-independent alternative to subword tokenization, but its longer input sequences typically result in increased computational cost and reduced model quality. We propose a compression scheme that employs a lightweight autoregressive byte language model to identify and remove bytes that are easily predictable from their surrounding context before Transformer processing. The resulting compressed representation is then provided as input to a standard encoder--decoder Transformer. Experiments on machine translation show that a substantial fraction of source-language bytes can be omitted without degrading translation quality. On English--French, our best method preserves translation performance while reducing source sequence length by nearly one-third. Additional experiments on Finnish--English, Russian--English, and Chinese--English demonstrate that the approach generalizes across diverse writing systems and morphological typologies, yielding comparable or improved translation quality at compression ratios between 0.47 and 0.67. These findings suggest that many input bytes are predictable enough to be represented implicitly rather than explicitly, providing a simple mechanism for reducing the sequence-length overhead associated with byte-level models. Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2608.15080 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2608.15080v1 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.15080 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Mark Hopkins [ view email ] [v1] Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:56:09 UTC (3,038 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled A Pilot Study of Autocompleting Tokenizers, by Samuel Wexler and Mark Hopkins View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CL < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab) Major funding support from

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