Recent work on tokenizer-free multilingual pretrained models show promising results in improving cross-lingual transfer and reducing engineering overhead (Clark et al., 2022; Xue et al., 2022). However, these works mainly focus on reporting accuracy on a limited set of tasks and data settings, placing less emphasis on other important factors when tuning and deploying the models in practice, such as memory usage, inference speed, and fine-tuning data robustness. We attempt to fill this gap by performing a comprehensive empirical comparison of multilingual tokenizer-free and subword-based models considering these various dimensions. Surprisingly, we find that subword-based models might still be the most practical choice in many settings, achieving better performance for lower inference latency and memory usage. Based on these results, we encourage future work in tokenizer-free methods to consider these factors when designing and evaluating new models.

综合比较多语言预训练模型的效率时，在考虑内存使用、推理速度和数据健壮性等方面，基于子词的模型仍然是许多场景下更可靠的选择，此为当前研究结果，建议未来的tokenizer-free方法在设计和评估模型时也要考虑这些因素。

无需分词的多语言预训练模型的多维度评估