AdaptiVocab:

Enhancing LLM Efficiency in Focused Domains

Technion – IIT · Habana Labs
AdaptiVocab pipeline illustration

The AdaptiVocab pipeline. Our method modifies an LLM's vocabulary by selecting domain-specific n-tokens, initializing embeddings with exponential weighting, and applying lightweight fine-tuning. This reduces token count by over 25% without sacrificing performance.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive versatility as general purpose models. However, their broad applicability comes at a high-cost computational overhead, particularly in auto-regressive decoding where each step requires a forward pass. In domain-specific settings, general-purpose capabilities are unnecessary and can be exchanged for efficiency. In this work, we take a novel perspective on domain adaptation, reducing latency and computational costs by adapting the vocabulary to focused domains of interest. We introduce AdaptiVocab, an end-to-end approach for vocabulary adaptation, designed to enhance LLM efficiency in low-resource domains. AdaptiVocab can be applied to any tokenizer and architecture, modifying the vocabulary by replacing tokens with domain-specific n-gram-based tokens, thereby reducing the number of tokens required for both input processing and output generation. AdaptiVocab initializes new n-token embeddings using an exponentially weighted combination of existing embeddings and employs a lightweight fine-tuning phase that can be efficiently performed on a single GPU. We evaluate two 7B LLMs across three niche domains, assessing efficiency, generation quality, and end-task performance. Our results show that AdaptiVocab reduces token usage by over 25% without compromising performance

BibTeX

@article{nakash2025adaptivocab,
        title={AdaptiVocab: Enhancing LLM Efficiency in Focused Domains through Lightweight Vocabulary Adaptation},
        author={Nakash, Itay and Calderon, Nitay and David, Eyal Ben and Hoffer, Elad and Reichart, Roi},
        journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19693},
        year={2025}
      }