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We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Edoardo Cetin , Tianyu Zhao , Yujin Tang

Diffusion models have shown promising generative capabilities across diverse domains, yet aligning their outputs with desired reward functions remains a challenge, particularly in cases where reward functions are non-differentiable. Some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Xiner Li , Masatoshi Uehara , Xingyu Su , Gabriele Scalia , Tommaso Biancalani , Aviv Regev , Sergey Levine , Shuiwang Ji

Despite recent progress, reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning of diffusion models often struggles with generalization, composability, and robustness against reward hacking. Recent studies have explored prompt refinement as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Suhyeon Lee , Jong Chul Ye

Inference-time compute has re-emerged as a practical way to improve LLM reasoning. Most test-time scaling (TTS) algorithms rely on autoregressive decoding, which is ill-suited to discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) due to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Jinbin Bai , Yixuan Li , Yuchen Zhu , Yi Xin , Qingyu Shi , Aosong Feng , Xiaohong Liu , Molei Tao , Jianru Xue , Xiangtai Li , Ming-Hsuan Yang

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely adopted in post-training for large language models (LLMs) at scale. Recently, the incentivization of reasoning capabilities in LLMs from RL indicates that $\textit{proper learning methods could…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zijun Liu , Peiyi Wang , Runxin Xu , Shirong Ma , Chong Ruan , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Yu Wu

Diffusion models that are based on iterative denoising have been recently proposed and leveraged in various generation tasks like image generation. Whereas, as a way inherently built for continuous data, existing diffusion models still have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Jiaao Chen , Aston Zhang , Mu Li , Alex Smola , Diyi Yang

We address the problem of fine-tuning diffusion models for reward-guided generation in biomolecular design. While diffusion models have proven highly effective in modeling complex, high-dimensional data distributions, real-world…

Text-guided molecule generation is a task where molecules are generated to match specific textual descriptions. Recently, most existing SMILES-based molecule generation methods rely on an autoregressive architecture. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Haisong Gong , Qiang Liu , Shu Wu , Liang Wang

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful class of generative models for chemistry and biology data. In these fields, the goal is to generate various samples with high rewards (e.g., drug-likeness in molecules), making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prin Phunyaphibarn , Minhyuk Sung

Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hanhan Zhou , Shamik Roy , Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text generative modeling, potentially addressing limitations of autoregressive (AR) models. However, current DLMs have been studied at a smaller scale compared to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Shansan Gong , Shivam Agarwal , Yizhe Zhang , Jiacheng Ye , Lin Zheng , Mukai Li , Chenxin An , Peilin Zhao , Wei Bi , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng , Lingpeng Kong

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generative performance but are fundamentally bottlenecked by their slow, iterative sampling process. While diffusion distillation techniques enable high-fidelity, few-step generation, traditional…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Linqian Fan , Peiqin Sun , Tiancheng Wen , Shun Lu , Chengru Song

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering stronger global awareness and highly parallel generation. However, post-training DLMs with standard Negative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Kecheng Chen , Ziru Liu , Xijia Tao , Hui Liu , Yibing Liu , Xinyu Fu , Shi Wu , Suiyun Zhang , Dandan Tu , Lingpeng Kong , Rui Liu , Haoliang Li

The probabilistic diffusion model (DM), generating content by inferencing through a recursive chain structure, has emerged as a powerful framework for visual generation. After pre-training on enormous data, the model needs to be properly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Tao Ren , Zishi Zhang , Jingyang Jiang , Zehao Li , Shentao Qin , Yi Zheng , Guanghao Li , Qianyou Sun , Yan Li , Jiafeng Liang , Xinping Li , Yijie Peng

Diffusion models have achieved impressive advancements in various vision tasks. However, these gains often rely on increasing model size, which escalates computational complexity and memory demands, complicating deployment, raising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yang Zhang , Er Jin , Wenzhong Liang , Yanfei Dong , Ashkan Khakzar , Philip Torr , Johannes Stegmaier , Kenji Kawaguchi

This work presents self-rewarding sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), an inference-time scaling algorithm enabling effective sampling of masked diffusion language models (MDLMs). Our algorithm stems from the observation that most existing MDLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ziwei Luo , Ziqi Jin , Lei Wang , Lidong Bing , Thomas B. Schön

Recent endeavors in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) aim to unify visual comprehension and generation by combining LLM and diffusion models, the state-of-the-art in each task, respectively. Existing approaches rely on spatial visual…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Kaihang Pan , Wang Lin , Zhongqi Yue , Tenglong Ao , Liyu Jia , Wei Zhao , Juncheng Li , Siliang Tang , Hanwang Zhang

This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provide excellent generative modeling capability, practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Tommaso Biancalani , Sergey Levine

We propose Diffusion-Sharpening, a fine-tuning approach that enhances downstream alignment by optimizing sampling trajectories. Existing RL-based fine-tuning methods focus on single training timesteps and neglect trajectory-level alignment,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Ye Tian , Ling Yang , Xinchen Zhang , Yunhai Tong , Mengdi Wang , Bin Cui