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perf: regexp2 pretokenizer, pooled buffers, offset-free fast encode path#80

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aeryncaen:perf/qwen-pretokenizer-regexp2
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perf: regexp2 pretokenizer, pooled buffers, offset-free fast encode path#80
aeryncaen wants to merge 2 commits intosugarme:masterfrom
aeryncaen:perf/qwen-pretokenizer-regexp2

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Summary

This PR improves tokenization throughput with three complementary changes:

  1. Switch RegexpPattern from stdlib regexp to dlclark/regexp2 — enables
    lookahead/lookbehind syntax required by modern tokenizers (GPT-4, Qwen, Llama 3)
    and provides significantly faster matching on complex pretokenizer patterns.
  2. Pooled scratch buffers and ASCII fast-path in the regexp2 matching layer —
    reduces per-call allocations for rune→byte mapping and match index collection.
  3. EncodeIDsOnly API and offset-free NormalizedString — a new
    Tokenizer.EncodeIDsOnly(string) ([]int, error) method that skips all
    per-byte alignment tracking and Encoding struct construction, returning
    only token IDs. This is the appropriate choice for any workload that does
    not need character-level offset mappings (training data pipelines, inference
    preprocessing, token counting, search indexing, etc.).

Additional changes

  • ByteLevel.UseRegex field + SetUseRegex() + use_regex JSON config
    honors the HuggingFace use_regex option so that when a prior Split
    pretokenizer already handles regex splitting, ByteLevel can skip its
    redundant GPT-2 split pass.
  • Sequence.PreTokenizers() accessor — exposes the underlying pretokenizer
    slice for pipeline introspection.
  • invert() pre-allocates its result slice.

New public API

Symbol Package Description
Tokenizer.EncodeIDsOnly(input string) ([]int, error) tokenizer Fast token-IDs-only encode; skips offset tracking and Encoding construction. Returns the same IDs as EncodeSingle(input).Ids (with addSpecialTokens=false, no truncation/padding).
PreTokenizedString.IntoIDs() ([]int, error) tokenizer Collects token IDs from a tokenized PreTokenizedString without building an Encoding.
NewPreTokenizedStringFast(s string) tokenizer Creates a PreTokenizedString backed by offset-free NormalizedString.
NewNormalizedFromFast(s string) normalizer Creates a NormalizedString that skips alignment array allocation. All mutation operations (Split, Transform, Prepend, etc.) still produce correct normalized text.
AddedVocabulary.ExtractAndNormalizeFast(...) tokenizer Offset-free variant of ExtractAndNormalize.
ByteLevel.UseRegex / SetUseRegex(bool) pretokenizer Controls whether ByteLevel applies its built-in GPT-2 regex split.
Sequence.PreTokenizers() pretokenizer Returns the underlying pretokenizer slice.

Benchmark

Setup: Single-threaded EncodeSingle / EncodeIDsOnly over 60,000 JSONL
documents on an Apple M4 Max. Median of 3 runs (Qwen3 before: 1 run due to
its 108 s runtime).

Qwen3 pretokenizer (complex GPT-style regex split + ByteLevel)

The Qwen3 tokenizer uses a complex regex pattern with Unicode character classes
(\p{L}, \p{N}) and alternations. The original pattern also contains a
negative lookahead (\s+(?!\S)) which is unsupported by Go's stdlib regexp.
For the baseline comparison, we used a simplified variant with the lookahead
removed (\s+(?!\S)|\s+\s+|\s+), since the lookahead branch is
redundant with the following \s+ alternative. This simplified pattern runs on
both the upstream stdlib regexp engine and our regexp2 engine.

Note: the token count differs between before and after (2,732,116 vs 2,462,116)
because regexp2 has more accurate .NET-style semantics for inline
case-insensitive groups ((?i:...)) and Unicode character classes compared to
Go's RE2-based regexp.

Method tok/s vs baseline
Before EncodeSingle (upstream, stdlib regexp) 25,289 1.0×
After EncodeSingle (regexp2 + pools) 668,000 26×
After EncodeIDsOnly (regexp2 + pools + skip offsets) 1,400,000 55×

BERT pretokenizer (simple BertPreTokenizer, no regex split)

Included to show the improvement on a lightweight pretokenizer where regex
matching is not the bottleneck — the gains here come from pooled buffers and
the offset-free path.

Method tok/s vs baseline
Before EncodeSingle (upstream) 593,000 1.0×
After EncodeSingle 693,000 1.17×
After EncodeIDsOnly 1,719,000 2.9×

Compatibility

  • Backward-compatible: EncodeSingle and all existing APIs are unchanged
    in behavior. The regexp2 engine is a strict superset of stdlib regexp
    for the patterns used by HuggingFace tokenizers.
  • New dependency: github.com/dlclark/regexp2 v1.11.5 (stock, no fork).
  • No replace directives in go.mod.

@aeryncaen aeryncaen closed this Feb 23, 2026
@aeryncaen
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...Claude is a moron and closed the PR for some reason.

@aeryncaen aeryncaen reopened this Feb 23, 2026
@aeryncaen aeryncaen force-pushed the perf/qwen-pretokenizer-regexp2 branch from 5df3025 to 36a1f5b Compare February 23, 2026 07:43
AddTokensWithIds registers tokens with explicit IDs from tokenizer.json
instead of recomputing them as model.GetVocabSize()+offset. This fixes
compacted vocabularies where added token IDs are non-sequential.

- AddedVocabulary.AddTokensWithIds: register with specified IDs
- Tokenizer.AddTokensWithIds + GetAddedVocab: public API
- CreateAddedTokensWithIds: preserves Id from TokenConfig
- FromReader: uses ID-preserving loading path
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