Article:Wikipedia contributors
Byte-Pair Encoding: From Data Compression to LLM Tokenization
Byte-pair encoding (BPE), originally introduced in 1994 by Philip Gage for data compression, serves in a modified form as the foundation for modern large language model tokenizers. Rather than aiming for maximum compression, the LLM adaptation builds a fixed token vocabulary by iteratively merging frequent n-grams.
From Video: Building an LLM from Scratch: Neural Networks, Tokenization, and Transformers