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Related papers: Any-Order GPT as Masked Diffusion Model: Decouplin…

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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

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

Modern language models have historically relied on two dominant design choices: subword tokenization and autoregressive (AR) ordering. These design decisions bake in priors that dictate a model's learning. Recently, two alternative…

Natural language understanding and generation models follow one of the two dominant architectural paradigms: language models (LMs) that process concatenated sequences in a single stack of layers, and encoder-decoder models (EncDec) that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Biao Zhang , Behrooz Ghorbani , Ankur Bapna , Yong Cheng , Xavier Garcia , Jonathan Shen , Orhan Firat

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

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the long-dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm, offering a parallelable decoding process that could yield greater efficiency. Yet, in practice, current open-source…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Han Peng , Peiyu Liu , Zican Dong , Daixuan Cheng , Junyi Li , Yiru Tang , Shuo Wang , Wayne Xin Zhao

Recent years have seen remarkable progress in both multimodal understanding models and image generation models. Despite their respective successes, these two domains have evolved independently, leading to distinct architectural paradigms:…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shanshan Zhao , Xinjie Zhang , Jintao Guo , Jiakui Hu , Lunhao Duan , Minghao Fu , Yong Xien Chng , Guo-Hua Wang , Qing-Guo Chen , Zhao Xu , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang

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

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

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

Large Language Diffusion Models (LLDMs) benefit from a flexible decoding mechanism that enables parallelized inference and controllable generations over autoregressive models. Yet such flexibility introduces a critical challenge: inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Yichuan Mo , Quan Chen , Mingjie Li , Zeming Wei , Yisen Wang

Autoregressive (AR) generation is the standard decoding paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), but its token-by-token nature limits parallelism at inference time. Diffusion Language Models (DLLMs) offer parallel decoding by recovering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Aiwei Liu , Minghua He , Shaoxun Zeng , Sijun Zhang , Linhao Zhang , Chuhan Wu , Wei Jia , Yuan Liu , Xiao Zhou , Jie Zhou

Diffusion language models, as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive (AR) models, enable faster generation and richer conditioning on bidirectional context. However, they suffer from a key discrepancy between training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Haoyu He , Katrin Renz , Yong Cao , Andreas Geiger

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive language models by enabling parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, their inference speed is significantly limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Satyam Goyal , Kushal Patel , Tanush Mittal , Arjun Laxman

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities that benefits from online reinforcement learning (RL). These capabilities have primarily been demonstrated within the left-to-right autoregressive (AR)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Siyan Zhao , Devaansh Gupta , Qinqing Zheng , Aditya Grover

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including document processing and code generation. Autoregressive Language Models (ARMs), which generate…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in high-level visual understanding. However, extending these models to fine-grained dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation and depth…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yi Li , Hongze Shen , Lexiang Tang , Xin Li , Xinpeng Ding , Yinsong Liu , Deqiang Jiang , Xing Sun , Xiaomeng Li

Recent large language model (LLM) research has undergone an architectural shift from encoder-decoder modeling to nowadays the dominant decoder-only modeling. This rapid transition, however, comes without a rigorous comparative analysis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Biao Zhang , Yong Cheng , Siamak Shakeri , Xinyi Wang , Min Ma , Orhan Firat

While diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area. Here, we introduce d2, a reasoning framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guanghan Wang , Gilad Turok , Yair Schiff , Marianne Arriola , Volodymyr Kuleshov