Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE)

baɪt-peər ɪˈkoʊdɪŋ

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a data compression technique that iteratively replaces the most frequent pair of bytes in a sequence with a single byte that does not occur in the sequence. This method is particularly effective for reducing the size of text data and is widely used in natural language processing tasks, especially for tokenization in language models. BPE helps in handling rare words by breaking them down into subword units, thus allowing models to work with a manageable vocabulary size. Its efficiency and effectiveness make it a popular choice in various AI applications, including machine translation and text generation.