LoPT: Lossless Parallel Tokenization Acceleration for Long Context Inference of Large Language Model

Wei Shao, Zheng Lingchao, Pengyu Wang, Peizhen Zheng, Li Jun, Yuwei Fan


Abstract
Long context inference scenarios have become increasingly important for large language models, yet they introduce significant computational latency. While prior research has optimized long-sequence inference through operators, model architectures, and system frameworks, tokenization remains an overlooked bottleneck. Existing parallel tokenization methods accelerate processing through text segmentation and multi-process tokenization, but they suffer from inconsistent results due to boundary artifacts that occur after merging. To address this, we propose LoPT, a novel Lossless Parallel Tokenization framework that ensures output identical to standard sequential tokenization. Our approach employs character-position-based matching and dynamic chunk length adjustment to align and merge tokenized segments accurately. Extensive experiments across diverse long-text datasets demonstrate that LoPT achieves significant speedup while guaranteeing lossless tokenization. We also provide theoretical proof of consistency and comprehensive analytical studies to validate the robustness of our method.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1529
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33107–33122
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1529/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Shao, Zheng Lingchao, Pengyu Wang, Peizhen Zheng, Li Jun, and Yuwei Fan. 2026. LoPT: Lossless Parallel Tokenization Acceleration for Long Context Inference of Large Language Model. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 33107–33122, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LoPT: Lossless Parallel Tokenization Acceleration for Long Context Inference of Large Language Model (Shao et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1529.pdf
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