diff --git a/common/arg.cpp b/common/arg.cpp
index 9f87e9910b540..73a3cfe5392c0 100644
--- a/common/arg.cpp
+++ b/common/arg.cpp
@@ -2627,6 +2627,13 @@ common_params_context common_params_parser_init(common_params & params, llama_ex
             params.i_chunk = value;
         }
     ).set_examples({LLAMA_EXAMPLE_IMATRIX}));
+    add_opt(common_arg(
+        {"--parse-special"},
+        string_format("prase special tokens (chat, tool, etc) (default: %s)", params.parse_special ? "true" : "false"),
+        [](common_params & params) {
+            params.parse_special = true;
+        }
+    ).set_examples({LLAMA_EXAMPLE_IMATRIX}));
     add_opt(common_arg(
         {"-pps"},
         string_format("is the prompt shared across parallel sequences (default: %s)", params.is_pp_shared ? "true" : "false"),
diff --git a/common/common.h b/common/common.h
index 90702245463cb..d051d4ec971c4 100644
--- a/common/common.h
+++ b/common/common.h
@@ -409,6 +409,7 @@ struct common_params {
 
     bool process_output = false; // collect data for the output tensor
     bool compute_ppl    = true;  // whether to compute perplexity
+    bool parse_special  = false; // whether to parse special tokens during imatrix tokenization
 
     // cvector-generator params
     int n_pca_batch = 100;
diff --git a/tools/imatrix/imatrix.cpp b/tools/imatrix/imatrix.cpp
index 2c39278dba3d9..81d0404d683d5 100644
--- a/tools/imatrix/imatrix.cpp
+++ b/tools/imatrix/imatrix.cpp
@@ -24,7 +24,8 @@ static void print_usage(int, char ** argv) {
     LOG("\n    %s \\\n"
             "       -m model.gguf -f some-text.txt [-o imatrix.dat] [--process-output] \\\n"
             "       [--no-ppl] [--chunk 123] [--output-frequency 10] [--save-frequency 0] \\\n"
-            "       [--in-file imatrix-prev-0.dat --in-file imatrix-prev-1.dat ...]\n" , argv[0]);
+            "       [--in-file imatrix-prev-0.dat --in-file imatrix-prev-1.dat ...] \\\n"
+            "       [--parse-special]\n" , argv[0]);
     LOG("\n");
 }
 
@@ -439,7 +440,7 @@ static bool compute_imatrix(llama_context * ctx, const common_params & params) {
     auto tim1 = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
     LOG_INF("%s: tokenizing the input ..\n", __func__);
 
-    std::vector<llama_token> tokens = common_tokenize(ctx, params.prompt, true);
+    std::vector<llama_token> tokens = common_tokenize(ctx, params.prompt, true, params.parse_special);
 
     auto tim2 = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
     LOG_INF("%s: tokenization took %g ms\n",__func__,1e-3*std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::microseconds>(tim2-tim1).count());