Edge 429: MambaByte and the Idea of Tokenization-Free SSMs
Can SSMs operated on raw data instead of tokens?
In this issue:
Exploring tokenization-free SSMs.
A review of the MambaByte paper.
An introduction to the MindDB framework.
💡 ML Concept of the Day: Tokenization-Free SSMs with MambaByte
Tokenizers are one of the key components of transformer models. The core idea of tokenizers is to provide a structured syntactic understanding by creating encodings that represent words, subwords or characters. Tokenization helps transformers to not have to learn this structure from the ground up but introduced challenges such as processing long sequences, hallucinations based on the token structure, the memory scaling limitations and, obviously, the pre-processing overhead required to build those tokenizers. The main alternative have been to build models that operate on raw text directly but those haven’t been particularly successful.
State Space Models(SSMs) offer a viable alternative to traditional transformer models with a fixed memory and efficient decoding mechanisms. MambaByte is one of the most interesting methods building on those ideas by proposing a token-free SSM based on the Mamba architecture that can directly operate on raw data. Instead of bre4aking inputs into tokens, MambaByte treats it as a continuous stream of data which leads to richer semantic interactions.