Reposted by Tim Vieira Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 15/08/2025My paper "Tokenization as Finite-State Transduction" was accepted to Computational Linguistics. This was my final PhD degree requirement :) The goal was to unify the major tokenization algorithms under a finite-state automaton framework. For example, by encoding a BPE tokenizer as a transducer. 2306
Reposted by Tim Vieira Ben Lipkin @benlipkin.bsky.social · 13/05/2025Many LM applications may be formulated as text generation conditional on some (Boolean) constraint. Generate a… - Python program that passes a test suite. - PDDL plan that satisfies a goal. - CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward. The list goes on… How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇 2136
Reposted by Tim Vieira Afra Amini @afraamn.bsky.social · 06/05/2025Current KL estimation practices in RLHF can generate high variance and even negative values! We propose a provably better estimator that only takes a few lines of code to implement.🧵👇 w/ @xtimv.bsky.social and Ryan Cotterell code: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10637 paper: github.com/rycolab/kl-rb 173
Reposted by Tim Vieira João Loula @joaoloula.bsky.social · 25/04/2025#ICLR2025 Oral How can we control LMs using diverse signals such as static analyses, test cases, and simulations? In our paper “Syntactic and Semantic Control of Large Language Models via Sequential Monte Carlo” (w/ @benlipkin.bsky.social, @alexlew.bsky.social, @xtimv.bsky.social) we: 176
Reposted by Tim Vieira Ben Lipkin @benlipkin.bsky.social · 10/04/2025New preprint on controlled generation from LMs! I'll be presenting at NENLP tomorrow 12:50-2:00pm Longer thread coming soon :) 1209
Reposted by Tim Vieira Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 10/02/2025Tokenization is an often-overlooked aspect of modern #NLP, but it’s experiencing a resurgence — thanks in large part to @karpathy.bsky.social and his classic tweet: x.com/karpathy/sta... Come hang out with us and let's fix these problems! 071
Reposted by Tim Vieira Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 10/02/2025Today we are launching a server dedicated to Tokenization research! Come join us! discord.gg/CDJhnSvUdiscord.ggJoin the Token ##ization Discord Server!Check out the Token ##ization community on Discord - hang out with 24 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat. 3186
Reposted by Tim Vieira Alex Lew @alexlew.bsky.social · 10/02/2025@xtimv.bsky.social and I were just discussing this interesting comment in the DeepSeek paper introducing GRPO: a different way of setting up the KL loss. It's a little hard to reason about what this does to the objective. 1/ 3509
Reposted by Tim Vieira Craig Schmidt @craigschmidt.com · 20/12/2024I made a starter pack for people in NLP working in the area of tokenization. Let me know if you'd like to be added go.bsky.app/8P9ftjL 0125
Reposted by Tim Vieira Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 31/12/2024It's ready! 💫 A new blog post in which I list of all the tools and apps I've been using for work, plus all my opinions about them. maria-antoniak.github.io/2024/12/30/o... Featuring @kagi.com, @warp.dev, @paperpile.bsky.social, @are.na, Fantastical, @obsidian.md, Claude, and more. 3621525
Reposted by Tim Vieira Brandon Amos @bdamos.bsky.social · 05/12/2024hi everyone!! let's try this optimal transport again 🙃 232931
Reposted by Tim Vieira Ned Batchelder @nedbat.com · 21/11/2024Also: you can also use variables (or expressions?!) for the formatting information! #Python is cool... More details and explanation at fstring.help 2366
Reposted by Tim Vieira Alex Lew @alexlew.bsky.social · 21/11/2024Surprisal of title beginning with 'O'? 3.22 Surprisal of 'o' following 'Treatment '? 0.11 Surprisal that title includes surprisal of each title character? Priceless [...I did not know titles could do this] 2102
Reposted by Tim Vieira Shauli Ravfogel @shauli.bsky.social · 12/11/2024Happy to share our work "Counterfactual Generation from Language Models" with @AnejSvete, @vesteinns, and Ryan Cotterell! We tackle generating true counterfactual strings from LMs after interventions and introduce a simple algorithm for it. (1/7) arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07180 2143
Reposted by Tim Vieira Alex Thiery @alexxthiery.bsky.social · 20/11/2024Variational approximation with Gaussian mixtures is looking cute! So here it's just gradient descent on K(q||p) for optimising the mixtures means & covariances & weights... @lacerbi.bsky.social 2337
Reposted by Tim Vieira Alex Thiery @alexxthiery.bsky.social · 20/11/2024Gaussian approximation of a target distribution: mean-field versus full-covariance! Below shows a simple gradient descent on KL(q||p) 3625