Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens

TL;DR

The Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) is a novel byte-level language model that encodes raw bytes into dynamic patches, achieving comparable performance to token-based models with improved efficiency and robustness at scale.

Contribution

BLT introduces a dynamic patching mechanism for byte-level models, enabling scalable training and inference without fixed vocabularies, and demonstrates superior scaling behavior.

Findings

BLT matches token-based model performance at scale.

Dynamic patching improves inference efficiency.

BLT exhibits better long tail generalization.

Abstract

We introduce the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT), a new byte-level LLM architecture that, for the first time, matches tokenization-based LLM performance at scale with significant improvements in inference efficiency and robustness. BLT encodes bytes into dynamically sized patches, which serve as the primary units of computation. Patches are segmented based on the entropy of the next byte, allocating more compute and model capacity where increased data complexity demands it. We present the first FLOP controlled scaling study of byte-level models up to 8B parameters and 4T training bytes. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of scaling models trained on raw bytes without a fixed vocabulary. Both training and inference efficiency improve due to dynamically selecting long patches when data is predictable, along with qualitative improvements on reasoning and long tail generalization. Overall, for fixed inference costs, BLT shows significantly better scaling than tokenization-based models, by simultaneously growing both patch and model size.