The Right Byte First: How UTF-16 Helps Multilingual Boundary Prediction
This work trains small causal predictors on matched FineWeb-2 text and evaluates on FLORES-200 under UTF-8, UBE, and UBE's same-length big-endian variant, finding that UBE's mean error falls below UTF-8's final mean error after only 25% and 37.5% of training.