{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/patching-leaks-in-the-charformer-for-1","title":"Patching Leaks in the Charformer for Efficient Character-Level Generation","arxiv_id":"2205.14086","date":"2022-05-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lukas Edman","Antonio Toral","Gertjan van Noord"],"abstract":"Character-based representations have important advantages over subword-based ones for morphologically rich languages. They come with increased robustness to noisy input and do not need a separate tokenization step. However, they also have a crucial disadvantage: they notably increase the length of text sequences. The GBST method from Charformer groups (aka downsamples) characters to solve this, but allows information to leak when applied to a Transformer decoder. We solve this information leak issue, thereby enabling character grouping in the decoder. We show that Charformer downsampling has no apparent benefits in NMT over previous downsampling methods in terms of translation quality, however it can be trained roughly 30% faster. Promising performance on English--Turkish translation indicate the potential of character-level models for morphologically-rich languages.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14086v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.14086v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"patching-leaks-in-the-charformer-for-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/leukas/patchinggbst","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"nmt","task_name":"NMT"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"charformer","method_name":"Charformer"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gradient-based-subword-tokenization","method_name":"Gradient-Based Subword Tokenization"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.14086","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}