gemma-2-tokenizer-spm

Gemma 2 tokenizer vocabulary, as reviewable text (.spm)

Google's Gemma 2 tokenizer.model converted, id for id, into a plain-text format that a human can read, diff and audit — and that a tokenizer can load without a protobuf dependency.

This is a modified file. See Modification notice below and the NOTICE file. Use is subject to the Gemma Terms of Use, including the Section 3.2 use restrictions — see Licence.

Nothing here is a model. This is a tokenizer vocabulary: the list of pieces a tokenizer splits text on, with the scores that decide merge order.

Why this exists

A SentencePiece tokenizer.model is a protocol buffer. That makes it opaque: you cannot diff two of them, grep one, or see in a pull request what a change did. It also means anything that wants to read one needs a protobuf parser and the SentencePiece schema.

The obvious alternative — the .tiktoken format, base64(token) rank per line — is lossy for SentencePiece, in three separate ways:

1. Scores are destroyed. SentencePiece merges by score, not by id order. Recovering merge order from id order is not an approximation, it is sometimes an inversion.
2. Byte-fallback spelling is destroyed. A real SentencePiece piece is spelled <0x41>; storing the raw byte forces a reader to reconstruct that spelling by scanning for a run of 256 consecutive ids.
3. Piece type is destroyed. SentencePiece matches USER_DEFINED pieces verbatim, before merging; they are never merge candidates. CONTROL pieces are never matched from text at all. Both score 0.0 and both are spelled <...>, so neither the score nor the spelling tells them apart.

That third one is not theoretical. Gemma 2 declares 245 USER_DEFINED pieces — HTML markers such as <blockquote> and <table>. Drop the type and <blockquote> is re-merged from < + blockquote + >, which measurably mistokenized 5.6% of real documents in testing. Gemma 3, which declares 6,410 of them (it adds the whitespace and newline runs), was worse.

This format keeps all three.

Format

One line per token id, in ascending id order, no gaps:

<base64 of the piece, UTF-8 encoded> <score> <type>

PHBhZD4= 0.0 3        # <pad>   score 0.0   CONTROL
PGVvcz4= 0.0 3        # <eos>   score 0.0   CONTROL
PGJvcz4= 0.0 3        # <bos>   score 0.0   CONTROL

• piece — SentencePiece's own id_to_piece(i), so <0x41> keeps its real byte-fallback spelling and ▁ word-boundary runs keep theirs. Base64 because a piece may contain spaces, newlines or invalid-looking bytes.
• score — get_score(i), written as the shortest decimal that round-trips the IEEE-754 value.
• type — SentencePiece's own ModelProto.SentencePiece.Type enum: 1 NORMAL, 2 UNKNOWN, 3 CONTROL, 4 USER_DEFINED, 6 BYTE.

The id is the line's position, so ids cannot be duplicated or non-monotonic by construction — there is no id field to disagree with the ordering.

What is in this vocabulary

Two properties worth knowing before you write a loader:

• add_dummy_prefix is false. Gemma does not prepend a word-boundary marker to the input, unlike Llama and Mistral. Prepending one anyway shifts the first piece of every input to a different token.
• byte_fallback is true, and the 256 <0xNN> pieces are how it is reached.

Verifying this file

The conversion is checked in both directions before the file is written — every piece, score and type is read back and compared against the source model, and each score is round-tripped through f32 to confirm it survives a single-precision parse. To repeat that yourself against your own copy of Google's tokenizer.model:

python extract_spm_vocab.py --model tokenizer.model --output gemma2.spm --verify

The script is scripts/extract_spm_vocab.py in splintr. Any SentencePiece implementation will do the same job; the format is simple enough to re-derive in a few lines.

Using it

import base64

pieces, scores, types = [], [], []
for line in open("gemma2.spm"):
    b64, score, kind = line.split()
    pieces.append(base64.b64decode(b64).decode("utf-8"))
    scores.append(float(score))
    types.append(int(kind))

# USER_DEFINED (4) pieces are matched verbatim, never merged.
user_defined = {p for p, t in zip(pieces, types) if t == 4}

Provenance

Extracted from Google's Gemma 2 tokenizer.model, MD5 f9e2445870ec741aa6346bbd75531bb4.

The vocabulary is Google's, not this repository's, and keeps Google's licence.

Modification notice

Required by Section 3.1 of the Gemma Terms of Use, and repeated in NOTICE:

gemma2.spm is a modified form of Google's Gemma 2 tokenizer.model — it is not the original file. The protocol-buffer model was converted, id by id, into the plain-text format described above. Nothing was added, removed, reordered or rounded: all 256,000 pieces keep their ids, scores and piece types, and no vocabulary entry differs from Google's file in any way.

Licence

Gemma is provided under and subject to the Gemma Terms of Use, found at ai.google.dev/gemma/terms and reproduced in full in the LICENSE file in this repository.

Use of this file is subject to the use restrictions in Section 3.2 of that agreement. If you distribute this file, or anything derived from it, you must pass those restrictions on to whoever you distribute to, provide them a copy of the agreement, and include the NOTICE file.

Gemma 2, Gemma 3 and EmbeddingGemma are covered by these terms. Gemma 4 is not — it is released under Apache-2.0, under a separate licence at ai.google.dev/gemma/apache_2.