Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a compelling non-autoregressive alternative to standard large language models; however, their application to morphologically rich languages remains limited. In this paper, we introduce Diffutron, a masked diffusion language model specifically designed for Turkish. Our approach leverages a resource-efficient training pipeline, starting with LoRA-based continual pre-training of a multilingual encoder on a large-scale corpus. To enable generative capabilities, we employ a progressive instruction-tuning strategy, sequentially adapting the model on general and task-specific instruction sets. Experimental results across comprehensive benchmarks demonstrate that, despite its compact size, our model achieves competitive performance compared to existing multi-billion-parameter baselines. These findings validate the effectiveness of masked diffusion modeling combined with multi-stage tuning for non-autoregressive text generation in Turkish.
@article{arxiv.2603.20466,
title = {Diffutron: A Masked Diffusion Language Model for Turkish Language},
author = {Şuayp Talha Kocabay and Talha Rüzgar Akkuş},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.20466},
year = {2026}
}