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Related papers: Likelihood-Based Diffusion Language Models

200 papers

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiyeon Kim , Sungik Choi , Yongrae Jo , Moontae Lee , Minjoon Seo

Score-based diffusion models synthesize samples by reversing a stochastic process that diffuses data to noise, and are trained by minimizing a weighted combination of score matching losses. The log-likelihood of score-based diffusion models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-22 Yang Song , Conor Durkan , Iain Murray , Stefano Ermon

Probabilistic regression models the entire predictive distribution of a response variable, offering richer insights than classical point estimates and directly allowing for uncertainty quantification. While diffusion-based generative models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Carlo Kneissl , Christopher Bülte , Philipp Scholl , Gitta Kutyniok

We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Shiyu Wang , Haolin Chen , Liangwei Yang , Jielin Qiu , Rithesh Murthy , Ming Zhu , Zixiang Chen , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Shelby Heinecke , Huan Wang

Improving the reasoning capabilities of diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) through reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open problem. The intractability of dLLMs likelihood function necessitates approximating the current, old,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Xiaohang Tang , Rares Dolga , Sangwoong Yoon , Ilija Bogunovic

Current language models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in text generation. However, for many applications it is desirable to control attributes, such as sentiment, or toxicity, of the generated language -- ideally tailored towards each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Justin Lovelace , Varsha Kishore , Yiwei Chen , Kilian Q. Weinberger

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential in language modeling, offering various advantages over traditional autoregressive approaches. Their ability to generate and revise entire responses in parallel enables faster generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Michael Hersche , Samuel Moor-Smith , Thomas Hofmann , Abbas Rahimi

A major bottleneck of standard auto-regressive large language models is that their inference process is inherently sequential, resulting in very long and costly inference times. To circumvent this, practitioners proposed a class of language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sitan Chen , Kevin Cong , Jerry Li

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text via iterative denoising but consistently underperform on multi-step reasoning. We hypothesize this gap stems from a coordination problem: AR models build coherence token-by-token, while…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Earl J St Sauver

Controlling the behavior of language models (LMs) without re-training is a major open problem in natural language generation. While recent works have demonstrated successes on controlling simple sentence attributes (e.g., sentiment), there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Xiang Lisa Li , John Thickstun , Ishaan Gulrajani , Percy Liang , Tatsunori B. Hashimoto

Diffusion models have become fundamental tools for modeling data distributions in machine learning. Despite their success, these models face challenges when generating data with extreme brightness values, as evidenced by limitations…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-10 Takuro Kutsuna

We derive a new theoretical interpretation of the reweighted losses that are widely used for training diffusion models. Our method is based on constructing a cascade of time-dependent variational lower bounds on the data log-likelihood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Jiaxin Shi , Michalis K. Titsias

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs, have recently shown strong results in pretraining. However, due to their lack of tractable sequence-level likelihoods, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Anthony Zhan

Can continuous diffusion models bring the same performance breakthrough on natural language they did for image generation? To circumvent the discrete nature of text data, we can simply project tokens in a continuous space of embeddings, as…

Masked (or absorbing) diffusion is actively explored as an alternative to autoregressive models for generative modeling of discrete data. However, existing work in this area has been hindered by unnecessarily complex model formulations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Jiaxin Shi , Kehang Han , Zhe Wang , Arnaud Doucet , Michalis K. Titsias

We present DiffusionBERT, a new generative masked language model based on discrete diffusion models. Diffusion models and many pre-trained language models have a shared training objective, i.e., denoising, making it possible to combine the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Zhengfu He , Tianxiang Sun , Kuanning Wang , Xuanjing Huang , Xipeng Qiu

Generative models that maximize model likelihood have gained traction in many practical settings. Among them, perturbation based approaches underpin many strong likelihood estimation models, yet they often face slow convergence and limited…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yirong Shen , Lu Gan , Cong Ling

Aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences has emerged as a critical research challenge. While recent advances in this area have extended preference optimization techniques from large language models (LLMs) to the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Junyong Kang , Seohyun Lim , Kyungjune Baek , Hyunjung Shim

We introduce TESS 2, a general instruction-following diffusion language model that outperforms contemporary instruction-tuned diffusion models, as well as matches and sometimes exceeds strong autoregressive (AR) models. We train TESS 2 by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jaesung Tae , Hamish Ivison , Sachin Kumar , Arman Cohan

Multi-label classification is prevalent in real-world settings, but the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this setting is understudied. We investigate how autoregressive LLMs perform multi-label classification, focusing on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Marcus Ma , Georgios Chochlakis , Niyantha Maruthu Pandiyan , Jesse Thomason , Shrikanth Narayanan