English

FastDiSS: Few-step Match Many-step Diffusion Language Model on Sequence-to-Sequence Generation--Full Version

Computation and Language 2026-04-08 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Self-conditioning has been central to the success of continuous diffusion language models, as it allows models to correct previous errors. Yet its ability degrades precisely in the regime where diffusion is most attractive for deployment: few-step sampling for fast inference. In this study, we show that when models only have a few denoising steps, inaccurate self-conditioning induces a substantial approximation gap; this mistake compounds across denoising steps and ultimately dominate the sample quality. To address this, we propose a novel training framework that handles these errors during learning by perturbing the self-conditioning signal to match inference noise, improving robustness to prior estimation errors. In addition, we introduce a token-level noise-awareness mechanism that prevents training from saturation, hence improving optimization. Extensive experiments across conditional generation benchmarks demonstrate that our framework surpasses standard continuous diffusion models while providing up to 400x faster inference speed, and remains competitive against other one-step diffusion frameworks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.05551,
  title  = {FastDiSS: Few-step Match Many-step Diffusion Language Model on Sequence-to-Sequence Generation--Full Version},
  author = {Dat Nguyen-Cong and Tung Kieu and Hoang Thanh-Tung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.05551},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

camera-ready version, accepted by ACL Findings (ACL 2026)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:56:52.337Z