Rate-Utility Frontiers for Language Encodings: Comparing Tokens, Bytes, and Pixels Under Controlled Linguistic Content

arXiv:2607.16117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models encode text as subword tokens, raw bytes, or rendered pixels, but these encodings are usually compared under modeling constraints that expose different amounts of linguistic content to models across different languages. We instead ask what each encoding preserves when both the content and the downstream capacity are controlled. Using verified parallel sentences across thirteen languages and five scripts, we compare tokens, bytes, an...