English
Related papers

Related papers: Likelihood-Based Diffusion Language Models

200 papers

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Georgios Batzolis , Mark Girolami , Luca Ambrogioni

Diffusion language models offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their global, non-causal generation process, but their continuous latent dynamics make discrete constraints -- e.g., the output should be a JSON file…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jinwoo Kim , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Loris D'Antoni

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, achieving state-of-the-art results in continuous data domains such as image and video generation. Their core mechanism involves a forward diffusion process that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Ashen Weligalle

We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Edoardo Cetin , Tianyu Zhao , Yujin Tang

Diffusion models have achieved great success in modeling continuous data modalities such as images, audio, and video, but have seen limited use in discrete domains such as language. Recent attempts to adapt diffusion to language have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Justin Lovelace , Varsha Kishore , Chao Wan , Eliot Shekhtman , Kilian Q. Weinberger

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of models and a promising route to fast language generation, but practical implementations typically rely on factored reverse transitions ignoring cross-token dependencies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Dario Shariatian , Alain Durmus , Umut Simsekli , Stefano Peluchetti

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for modern generative modeling, demonstrating strong potential for large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional autoregressive (AR) models that generate tokens sequentially,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Gen Li , Changxiao Cai

Diffusion models are a class of flexible generative models trained with an approximation to the log-likelihood objective. However, most use cases of diffusion models are not concerned with likelihoods, but instead with downstream objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Kevin Black , Michael Janner , Yilun Du , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

In this work, we propose Dimple, the first Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Model (DMLLM). We observe that training with a purely discrete diffusion approach leads to significant training instability, suboptimal performance, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Runpeng Yu , Xinyin Ma , Xinchao Wang

Continuous diffusion has been the foundation of high-fidelity, controllable, and few-step generation of many data modalities such as images. However, in language modeling, prior continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) lag behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yuxin Chen , Chumeng Liang , Hangke Sui , Ruihan Guo , Chaoran Cheng , Jiaxuan You , Ge Liu

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as strong alternatives to autoregressive language models, matching their performance through large-scale training. However, inference-time control remains relatively underexplored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Meihua Dang , Jiaqi Han , Minkai Xu , Kai Xu , Akash Srivastava , Stefano Ermon

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Shen Nie , Fengqi Zhu , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Qian Liu , Guangtao Zeng , Min Lin , Chongxuan Li

Aligning large language models with human preferences has emerged as a critical focus in language modeling research. Yet, integrating preference learning into Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models is still relatively uncharted territory.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Yi Gu , Zhendong Wang , Yueqin Yin , Yujia Xie , Mingyuan Zhou

Diffusion-based language models are emerging as a promising alternative to autoregressive LMs: they approach the competence of autoregressive LMs while offering nuanced controllability at inference time. While autoregressive LMs have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Xiaochuang Han , Sachin Kumar , Yulia Tsvetkov , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Diffusion (Large) Language Models (dLLMs) now match the downstream performance of their autoregressive counterparts on many tasks, while holding the promise of being more efficient during inference. One critical design aspect of dLLMs is…

We present a masked diffusion language modeling framework for data-efficient training for the BabyLM 2025 Challenge. Our approach applies diffusion training objectives to language modeling under strict data constraints, incorporating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Despoina Kosmopoulou , Efthymios Georgiou , Vaggelis Dorovatas , Georgios Paraskevopoulos , Alexandros Potamianos

LLMs have become the mainstream approaches to code generation. Existing LLMs mainly employ autoregressive generation, i.e. generating code token-by-token from left to right. However, the underlying autoregressive generation has two…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Chengze Li , Yitong Zhang , Jia Li , Liyi Cai , Ge Li

In this work, we provide a systematic survey of Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) and Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Language Models (dMLLMs). Unlike autoregressive (AR) models, dLLMs and dMLLMs adopt a multi-token, parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Runpeng Yu , Qi Li , Xinchao Wang

Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in modern NLP. An important advantage of PLMs is good out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Recently, diffusion models have attracted a lot of work to apply…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Huazheng Wang , Daixuan Cheng , Haifeng Sun , Jingyu Wang , Qi Qi , Jianxin Liao , Jing Wang , Cong Liu

The modern autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance on NLP benchmarks, and they are deployed in the real world. However, they still suffer from limitations of the autoregressive training paradigm.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Justin Deschenaux , Caglar Gulcehre