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Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for generative modeling over discrete domains. It is known that MDMs effectively train to decode tokens in a random order, and that this ordering has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Prateek Garg , Bhavya Kohli , Sunita Sarawagi

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

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation while achieving competitive performance. Despite these advantages, MDMs face a fundamental limitation: once…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yair Schiff , Omer Belhasin , Roy Uziel , Guanghan Wang , Marianne Arriola , Gilad Turok , Michael Elad , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models over discrete domains. MDMs generate sequences in an any-order, parallel fashion, enabling fast inference and strong performance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Jaeyeon Kim , Lee Cheuk-Kit , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Yilun Du , Sham Kakade , Timothy Ngotiaoco , Sitan Chen , Michael Albergo

Masked discrete diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising new approach to generative modelling, offering the ability for parallel token generation and therefore greater efficiency than autoregressive counterparts. However, achieving an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 David Fox , Sam Bowyer , Song Liu , Laurence Aitchison , Raul Santos-Rodriguez , Mengyue Yang

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Chunsan Hong , Sanghyun Lee , Chieh-Hsin Lai , Satoshi Hayakawa , Yuhta Takida , Yuki Mitsufuji , Seungryong Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Post-training pretrained autoregressive models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) has emerged as a cost-effective way to overcome the limitations of sequential generation. Yet it remains unclear whether post-trained MDMs acquire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Injin Kong , Hyoungjoon Lee , Yohan Jo

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a novel framework for language modeling. MDMs generate sentences by iteratively denoising masked sequences, filling in [MASK] tokens step by step. Although MDMs support any-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Chunsan Hong , Seonho An , Min-Soo Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Autoregressive models (ARMs) are hindered by slow sequential inference. While masked diffusion models (MDMs) offer a parallel alternative, they suffer from critical drawbacks: high computational overhead from precluding Key-Value (KV)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Jia-Nan Li , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Chongxuan Li

Autoregressive language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggle with complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We introduce discrete diffusion models as a novel solution to these challenges. Through the lens of subgoal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Jiacheng Ye , Jiahui Gao , Shansan Gong , Lin Zheng , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Lingpeng Kong

Diffusion language models have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models. Beyond next-token generation, they are more efficient and flexible by enabling parallel and any-order token generation. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chenxiao Yang , Cai Zhou , David Wipf , Zhiyuan Li

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

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) uniquely support any-order generation, with confidence-based decoding currently serving as the de facto standard inference policy. To optimize for this, recent training schemes attempt to align…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Dueun Kim , Albert No

Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pengcheng Huang , Tianming Liu , Zhenghao Liu , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Tong Xiao , Zulong Chen , Maosong Sun

Masked diffusion models (MDM) are powerful generative models for discrete data that generate samples by progressively unmasking tokens in a sequence. Each token can take one of two states: masked or unmasked. We observe that token sequences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Chen-Hao Chao , Wei-Fang Sun , Hanwen Liang , Chun-Yi Lee , Rahul G. Krishnan

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

Any order generation of discrete data using masked diffusion models (MDMs) offers a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive models, especially in domains that lack a natural causal ordering of data. However, current popular…

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Moongyu Jeon , Sangwoo Shin , BumJun Kim , Kyelim Lee , Albert No

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yuxiang Wang , Yu Xiang , Baojian Zhou , Qifang Zhao , Keyue Jiang , Yanghua Xiao , Xiaoxiao Xu

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
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