English
Related papers

Related papers: Likelihood-Based Diffusion Language Models

200 papers

Diffusion language models have emerged as a promising approach for text generation. One would naturally expect this method to be an efficient replacement for autoregressive models since multiple tokens can be sampled in parallel during each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Guhao Feng , Yihan Geng , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Liwei Wang , Di He

Diffusion probabilistic models have achieved mainstream success in many generative modeling tasks, from image generation to inverse problem solving. A distinct feature of these models is that they correspond to deep hierarchical latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Yibo Yang , Justus C. Will , Stephan Mandt

Diffusion probabilistic models have shown great success in generating high-quality images controllably, and researchers have tried to utilize this controllability into text generation domain. Previous works on diffusion-based language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yiwei Lyu , Tiange Luo , Jiacheng Shi , Todd C. Hollon , Honglak Lee

Despite being trained specifically to follow user instructions, today's instructiontuned language models perform poorly when instructed to produce random outputs. For example, when prompted to pick a number uniformly between one and ten…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Yiming Zhang , Avi Schwarzschild , Nicholas Carlini , Zico Kolter , Daphne Ippolito

Discrete diffusion models have recently become competitive with autoregressive models for language modeling, even outperforming them on reasoning tasks requiring planning and global coherence, but they require more computation at inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Andre He , Sean Welleck , Daniel Fried

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, order-agnostic generation with iterative refinement, offering a flexible alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, adapting reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Kevin Rojas , Jiahe Lin , Kashif Rasul , Anderson Schneider , Yuriy Nevmyvaka , Molei Tao , Wei Deng

We present an novel framework for efficiently and effectively extending the powerful continuous diffusion processes to discrete modeling. Previous approaches have suffered from the discrepancy between discrete data and continuous modeling.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Yuxuan Gu , Xiaocheng Feng , Lei Huang , Yingsheng Wu , Zekun Zhou , Weihong Zhong , Kun Zhu , Bing Qin

Most large language models are autoregressive: they generate tokens one at a time. Discrete diffusion language models can generate multiple tokens in parallel, but sampling from them requires a denoising order: a strategy for deciding which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Daniel Israel , Tian Jin , Ellie Cheng , Guy Van den Broeck , Aditya Grover , Suvinay Subramanian , Michael Carbin

Text-to-image diffusion models are a class of deep generative models that have demonstrated an impressive capacity for high-quality image generation. However, these models are susceptible to implicit biases that arise from web-scale…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Yinan Zhang , Eric Tzeng , Yilun Du , Dmitry Kislyuk

Diffusion Language models (DLMs) are a promising avenue for text generation due to their practical properties on tractable controllable generation. They also have the advantage of not having to predict text autoregressively. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Sofia Maria Lo Cicero Vaina , Nikita Balagansky , Daniil Gavrilov

Diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated a capacity for perceptually impressive synthesis, but can they also be great likelihood-based models? We answer this in the affirmative, and introduce a family of diffusion-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Diederik P. Kingma , Tim Salimans , Ben Poole , Jonathan Ho

Diffusion language models have emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive models, enabling fast inference through more flexible and parallel generation paths. This flexibility of sampling is unlocked by new engineered sampling…

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation and bidirectional context, yet they underperform autoregressive (AR) models in both likelihood modeling and generated text quality. We identify that this performance gap arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

Although autoregressive models have dominated language modeling in recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring alternative paradigms to the conventional next-token prediction framework. Diffusion-based language models have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Chihan Huang , Hao Tang

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruizhe Chen , Wenhao Chai , Zhifei Yang , Xiaotian Zhang , Joey Tianyi Zhou , Tony Quek , Soujanya Poria , Zuozhu Liu

One of the most compelling features of global discrete diffusion language models is their global bidirectional contextual capability. However, existing block-based diffusion studies tend to introduce autoregressive priors, which, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Linrui Ma , Yufei Cui , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

Language models based on discrete diffusion have attracted widespread interest for their potential to provide faster generation than autoregressive models. Despite their promise, these models typically produce samples whose quality sharply…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Chanhyuk Lee , Jaehoon Yoo , Manan Agarwal , Sheel Shah , Jerry Huang , Aditi Raghunathan , Seunghoon Hong , Nicholas M. Boffi , Jinwoo Kim

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Dawen Liang , Wenpin Tang , David Yao , Nathan Kallus

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in improving autoregressive models, especially in domains requiring correctness like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Chenxing Wei , Jiazhen Kang , Hong Wang , Jianqing Zhang , Hao Jiang , Xiaolong Xu , Ningyuan Sun , Ying He , F. Richard Yu , Yao Shu , Bo Jiang

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation, which in turn presents new challenges for aligning them with human preferences. In this work, we aim to improve the policy optimization for dLLMs by…