Fast Byte Latent Transformer

Julie Kallini, Artidoro Pagnoni, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Christopher Potts, Xiaochuang Han, Srini Iyer
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 306:55236-55263, 2026.

Abstract

Recent byte-level language models (LMs) match the performance of token-level models without relying on subword vocabularies, yet their utility is limited by slow, byte-by-byte autoregressive generation. We address this bottleneck in the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) through new training and generation techniques. First, we introduce BLT Diffusion (BLT-D), a new model and our fastest BLT variant, trained with an auxiliary block-wise diffusion objective alongside the standard next-byte prediction loss. This enables an inference procedure that generates multiple bytes in parallel per decoding step, substantially reducing the number of forward passes required to generate a sequence. Second, we propose two extensions inspired by speculative decoding that trade some of this speed for higher generation quality: BLT Self-speculation (BLT-S), in which BLT’s local decoder continues generating past its normal patch boundaries to draft bytes, which are then verified with a single full-model forward pass; and BLT Diffusion+Verification (BLT-DV), which augments BLT-D with an autoregressive verification step after diffusion-based generation. All methods may achieve an estimated memory-bandwidth cost over 50% lower than BLT on generation tasks. Each approach offers its own unique advantages, together removing key barriers to the practical use of byte-level LMs.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v306-kallini26a, title = {Fast Byte Latent Transformer}, author = {Kallini, Julie and Pagnoni, Artidoro and Limisiewicz, Tomasz and Ghosh, Gargi and Zettlemoyer, Luke and Potts, Christopher and Han, Xiaochuang and Iyer, Srini}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {55236--55263}, year = {2026}, editor = {Zhang, Tong and Dudik, Miroslav and Jaggi, Martin and Agarwal, Alekh and Li, Sharon and Schuurmans, Dale and Zhu, Jerry and Berkenkamp, Felix and Dong, Hanze and Bietti, Alberto}, volume = {306}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {06--11 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v306/main/assets/kallini26a/kallini26a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v306/kallini26a.html}, abstract = {Recent byte-level language models (LMs) match the performance of token-level models without relying on subword vocabularies, yet their utility is limited by slow, byte-by-byte autoregressive generation. We address this bottleneck in the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) through new training and generation techniques. First, we introduce BLT Diffusion (BLT-D), a new model and our fastest BLT variant, trained with an auxiliary block-wise diffusion objective alongside the standard next-byte prediction loss. This enables an inference procedure that generates multiple bytes in parallel per decoding step, substantially reducing the number of forward passes required to generate a sequence. Second, we propose two extensions inspired by speculative decoding that trade some of this speed for higher generation quality: BLT Self-speculation (BLT-S), in which BLT’s local decoder continues generating past its normal patch boundaries to draft bytes, which are then verified with a single full-model forward pass; and BLT Diffusion+Verification (BLT-DV), which augments BLT-D with an autoregressive verification step after diffusion-based generation. All methods may achieve an estimated memory-bandwidth cost over 50% lower than BLT on generation tasks. Each approach offers its own unique advantages, together removing key barriers to the practical use of byte-level LMs.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Fast Byte Latent Transformer %A Julie Kallini %A Artidoro Pagnoni %A Tomasz Limisiewicz %A Gargi Ghosh %A Luke Zettlemoyer %A Christopher Potts %A Xiaochuang Han %A Srini Iyer %B Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2026 %E Tong Zhang %E Miroslav Dudik %E Martin Jaggi %E Alekh Agarwal %E Sharon Li %E Dale Schuurmans %E Jerry Zhu %E Felix Berkenkamp %E Hanze Dong %E Alberto Bietti %F pmlr-v306-kallini26a %I PMLR %P 55236--55263 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v306/kallini26a.html %V 306 %X Recent byte-level language models (LMs) match the performance of token-level models without relying on subword vocabularies, yet their utility is limited by slow, byte-by-byte autoregressive generation. We address this bottleneck in the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) through new training and generation techniques. First, we introduce BLT Diffusion (BLT-D), a new model and our fastest BLT variant, trained with an auxiliary block-wise diffusion objective alongside the standard next-byte prediction loss. This enables an inference procedure that generates multiple bytes in parallel per decoding step, substantially reducing the number of forward passes required to generate a sequence. Second, we propose two extensions inspired by speculative decoding that trade some of this speed for higher generation quality: BLT Self-speculation (BLT-S), in which BLT’s local decoder continues generating past its normal patch boundaries to draft bytes, which are then verified with a single full-model forward pass; and BLT Diffusion+Verification (BLT-DV), which augments BLT-D with an autoregressive verification step after diffusion-based generation. All methods may achieve an estimated memory-bandwidth cost over 50% lower than BLT on generation tasks. Each approach offers its own unique advantages, together removing key barriers to the practical use of byte-level LMs.
APA
Kallini, J., Pagnoni, A., Limisiewicz, T., Ghosh, G., Zettlemoyer, L., Potts, C., Han, X. & Iyer, S.. (2026). Fast Byte Latent Transformer. Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 306:55236-55263 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v306/kallini26a.html.

Related Material