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Related papers: Path Planning for Masked Diffusion Model Sampling

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Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in language modeling, offering the advantages of parallel decoding and bidirectional context processing within a simple yet effective framework.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jaehoon Yoo , Wonjung Kim , Chanhyuk Lee , Seunghoon Hong

Part of the success of diffusion models stems from their ability to perform iterative refinement, i.e., repeatedly correcting outputs during generation. However, modern masked discrete diffusion lacks this capability: when a token is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guanghan Wang , Yair Schiff , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zachary Horvitz , Raghav Singhal , Hao Zou , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Zhou Yu , Rajesh Ranganath , Kathleen McKeown

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) significantly accelerate inference by trading off sequential determinism. However, the theoretical mechanisms governing generation order and the risks inherent in parallelization remain under-explored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Shaorong Zhang , Longxuan Yu , Rob Brekelmans , Luhan Tang , Salman Asif , Greg Ver Steeg

We present self-speculative masked diffusions, a new class of masked diffusion generative models for discrete data that require significantly fewer function evaluations to generate samples. Standard masked diffusion models predict…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-09 Andrew Campbell , Valentin De Bortoli , Jiaxin Shi , Arnaud Doucet

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs), but they suffer from inherently much higher training variance. High variance leads to noisier gradient estimates and unstable optimization, so even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Mengni Jia , Mengyu Zhou , Yihao Liu , Xiaoxi Jiang , Guanjun Jiang

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for language modeling, yet the effective design of transformer architectures for MDMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sanghyun Lee , Chunsan Hong , Seungryong Kim , Jonghyun Lee , Jongho Park , Dongmin Park

Recent masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown competitive performance compared to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. While most literature has focused on performance enhancing sampling procedures, efficient sampling from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Heli Ben-Hamu , Itai Gat , Daniel Severo , Niklas Nolte , Brian Karrer

Text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) develop at an unprecedented pace, supported by thorough theoretical exploration and empirical analysis. Unfortunately, the discrepancy between DMs and autoregressive models (ARMs) complicates the path…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Shitong Shao , Zikai Zhou , Tian Ye , Lichen Bai , Zhiqiang Xu , Zeke Xie

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a potential alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language generation, but generation quality depends critically on the generation order. Prior work either hard-codes an ordering (e.g., blockwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Chunsan Hong , Sanghyun Lee , Jong Chul Ye

Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful tool for planning. However, unlike Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-whose performance naturally improves with inference-time computation scaling-standard diffusion-based planners offer only…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Jaesik Yoon , Hyeonseo Cho , Doojin Baek , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn

Recent advances in masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) narrow the quality gap to autoregressive LMs, but their sampling remains expensive because generation requires many full-sequence denoising passes with a large Transformer and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ivan Sedykh , Nikita Sorokin , Valentin Malykh

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently gained traction as a viable generative framework for natural language. This can be attributed to its scalability and ease of training compared to other diffusion model paradigms for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Tejomay Kishor Padole , Suyash P Awate , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

The performance of optimization-based robot motion planning algorithms is highly dependent on the initial solutions, commonly obtained by running a sampling-based planner to obtain a collision-free path. However, these methods can be slow…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-15 J. Carvalho , A. Le , P. Kicki , D. Koert , J. Peters

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved great success in image generation but suffer from high inference latency due to their iterative denoising nature. Motivated by the evolving feature dynamics across the denoising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Haodong He , Yuan Gao , Weizhong Zhang , Gui-Song Xia

Generative modeling of discrete data underlies important applications spanning text-based agents like ChatGPT to the design of the very building blocks of life in protein sequences. However, application domains need to exert control over…

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative tools, rivaling GANs in sample quality and mirroring the likelihood scores of autoregressive models. A subset of these models, exemplified by DDIMs, exhibit an inherent asymmetry: they…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Yixuan Wang , Shuangyin Li

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate text by iteratively selecting positions to unmask and then predicting tokens at those positions. Yet MDMs lack proper likelihood evaluation: the evidence lower bound (ELBO) is not only a loose bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Gilad Turok , Chris De Sa , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising approach for generative modeling in discrete spaces. By generating sequences in any order and allowing for parallel decoding, they enable fast inference and strong performance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jaeyeon Kim , Jonathan Geuter , David Alvarez-Melis , Sham Kakade , Sitan Chen

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) are a class of generative models which have recently been shown to produce excellent samples. We show that with a few simple modifications, DDPMs can also achieve competitive log-likelihoods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Alex Nichol , Prafulla Dhariwal