In a way, some things like this are possible/have been explored.<p>In Huffman coding, the code length is log2(length of path in binary tree to x) ~ log2(1/p(x)).<p>BPE works by combining the most frequent pair of adjacent tokens into a new token. So generally speaking, the most frequent token end up being earliest in the vocab, having a lower index. The number of bits to encode that index is log2(i(x)). In theory if you could have variable width int indices, then shorter indices would correspond with the more frequent tokens, so log2(i(x)) would correlate somewhat with log2(1/p(x)) and you would end up getting some compression.<p>Finally, it's also worth mentioning that somebody did try doing an LLM over entropy compressed tokens - there were some compute efficiency gains, but it didn't really help language modeling:<p><i>In this paper, we explore the idea of training large language models (LLMs) over highly compressed text. While standard subword tokenizers compress text by a small factor, neural text compressors can achieve much higher rates of compression. If it were possible to train LLMs directly over neurally compressed text, this would confer advantages in training and serving efficiency, as well as easier handling of long text spans. The main obstacle to this goal is that strong compression tends to produce opaque outputs that are not well-suited for learning. In particular, we find that text naïvely compressed via Arithmetic Coding is not readily learnable by LLMs. To overcome this, we propose Equal-Info Windows, a novel compression technique whereby text is segmented into blocks that each compress to the same bit length. Using this method, we demonstrate effective learning over neurally compressed text that improves with scale, and outperforms byte-level baselines by a wide margin on perplexity and inference speed benchmarks. While our method delivers worse perplexity than subword tokenizers for models trained with the same parameter count, it has the benefit of shorter sequence lengths. Shorter sequence lengths require fewer autoregressive generation steps, and reduce latency. Finally, we provide extensive analysis of the properties that contribute to learnability, and offer concrete suggestions for how to further improve the performance of high-compression tokenizers.</i><p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03626" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03626</a>