If you're encoding the rankings as raw bits, how do you know when one ranking ends and the next begins? Zip compression solves this by using a BST, where you'd know if you need to keep reading by whether or not you've reached a leaf. But if there's no reference data structure to tell you this, how do you know if you should read 4 bits ahead or 5?
I suppose the compression process looks like this :
If the model is good at predicting what the next token is, I suppose you need only 2bits to encode each token (for any of the top 4 predictions).
If you're encoding the rankings as raw bits, how do you know when one ranking ends and the next begins? Zip compression solves this by using a BST, where you'd know if you need to keep reading by whether or not you've reached a leaf. But if there's no reference data structure to tell you this, how do you know if you should read 4 bits ahead or 5?