diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index f70f73ab2..a50945fb5 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ and this project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](http://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.
 ## [Unreleased]
 
 ### Added
+- Added `--no-spm-encode` option, allowing the model to use vocabulary IDs directly to train/decode.
 - Added --custom-fallbacks option that allows to specify a list of option sets that get traversed for subsequent fallbacks upon divergence
 - Added --overwrite-checkpoint option that (when set to false) can be used to dump checkpoints with iteration numbers.   
 - Implementations of COMET-20 (reference-based) and BLEURT-20 for inference with conversion scripts.
diff --git a/src/common/config_parser.cpp b/src/common/config_parser.cpp
index bad9904f9..a6e38792f 100644
--- a/src/common/config_parser.cpp
+++ b/src/common/config_parser.cpp
@@ -411,6 +411,9 @@ void ConfigParser::addOptionsTraining(cli::CLIWrapper& cli) {
       "Maximum lines to train SentencePiece vocabulary, selected with sampling from all data. "
       "When set to 0 all lines are going to be used.",
       2000000);
+  cli.add<bool>("--no-spm-encode",
+      "Assume the input has already had sentencepiece applied before decoding. "
+      "Expects spm pieces, like the ones produced by spm_encode's default format.");
 #endif
   // scheduling options
 
@@ -752,6 +755,9 @@ void ConfigParser::addOptionsTranslation(cli::CLIWrapper& cli) {
 #ifdef USE_SENTENCEPIECE
   cli.add<bool>("--no-spm-decode",
       "Keep the output segmented into SentencePiece subwords");
+  cli.add<bool>("--no-spm-encode",
+      "Assume the input has already had sentencepiece applied before decoding. "
+      "Expects spm pieces, like the ones produced by spm_encode's default format.");
 #endif
 
   addSuboptionsInputLength(cli);
diff --git a/src/data/sentencepiece_vocab.cpp b/src/data/sentencepiece_vocab.cpp
index dc06cc17b..548b95a46 100644
--- a/src/data/sentencepiece_vocab.cpp
+++ b/src/data/sentencepiece_vocab.cpp
@@ -39,6 +39,9 @@ class SentencePieceVocab : public IVocab {
   // Keeps sentences segmented into subword units
   bool keepEncoded_{false};
 
+  // Assume sentencepiece has already been applied and we are expecting spm pieces as input
+  bool noEncode_{false};
+
   // Contains control characters added to vocab due to byte-fallback
   std::vector<Word> controlChars_;
 
@@ -127,7 +130,8 @@ class SentencePieceVocab : public IVocab {
       : options_(options),
         batchIndex_(batchIndex),
         generator_((uint32_t)Config::seed),
-        keepEncoded_(options->get<bool>("no-spm-decode", false)) {
+        keepEncoded_(options->get<bool>("no-spm-decode", false)),
+        noEncode_(options->get<bool>("no-spm-encode", false)) {
     if(options_->has("sentencepiece-alphas")) {
       auto alphas = options_->get<std::vector<float>>("sentencepiece-alphas");
       if(alphas.size() <= batchIndex)
@@ -221,16 +225,24 @@ class SentencePieceVocab : public IVocab {
   }
 
   Words encode(const std::string& line, bool addEOS, bool inference) const override {
-    std::vector<int> spmIds;
-    if(inference || alpha_ == 0)
-      spm_->Encode(line, &spmIds);
-    else
-      spm_->SampleEncode(line, -1, alpha_, &spmIds);
-
     Words words;
-    words.reserve(spmIds.size() + addEOS);
-    for (auto&& spmId : spmIds)
-      words.push_back(Word::fromWordIndex(spmId));
+    if (noEncode_) {
+      auto lineTokens = utils::split(line, " ");
+      words.reserve(lineTokens.size() + addEOS);
+      for (auto&& token : lineTokens) {
+        words.push_back((*this)[token]);
+      }
+    } else {
+      std::vector<int> spmIds;
+      if(inference || alpha_ == 0)
+        spm_->Encode(line, &spmIds);
+      else
+        spm_->SampleEncode(line, -1, alpha_, &spmIds);
+
+      words.reserve(spmIds.size() + addEOS);
+      for (auto&& spmId : spmIds)
+        words.push_back(Word::fromWordIndex(spmId));
+    }
 
     if(addEOS)
       words.push_back(getEosId());