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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

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

There has been a longstanding belief that generation can facilitate a true understanding of visual data. In line with this, we revisit generatively pre-training visual representations in light of recent interest in denoising diffusion…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Chen Wei , Karttikeya Mangalam , Po-Yao Huang , Yanghao Li , Haoqi Fan , Hu Xu , Huiyu Wang , Cihang Xie , Alan Yuille , Christoph Feichtenhofer

This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the use of diffusion models in natural language processing (NLP). Diffusion models are a class of mathematical models that aim to capture the diffusion of information or signals across a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Hao Zou , Zae Myung Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Modern LLM pre-training consumes vast amounts of compute and training data, making the scaling behavior, or scaling laws, of different models a key distinguishing factor. Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) have been proposed as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Dimitri von Rütte , Janis Fluri , Omead Pooladzandi , Bernhard Schölkopf , Thomas Hofmann , Antonio Orvieto

Many approaches have been proposed to use diffusion models to augment training datasets for downstream tasks, such as classification. However, diffusion models are themselves trained on large datasets, often with noisy annotations, and it…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Max F. Burg , Florian Wenzel , Dominik Zietlow , Max Horn , Osama Makansi , Francesco Locatello , Chris Russell

Diffusion models offer stable training and state-of-the-art performance for deep generative modeling tasks. Here, we consider their use in the context of multivariate subsurface modeling and probabilistic inversion. We first demonstrate…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Roberto Miele , Niklas Linde

In sequence-to-sequence Transformer ASR, autoregressive (AR) models achieve strong accuracy but suffer from slow decoding, while non-autoregressive (NAR) models enable parallel decoding at the cost of degraded performance. We propose a…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-26 Hao Yen , Pin-Jui Ku , Ante Jukić , Sabato Marco Siniscalchi

Data scarcity drives the need for more sample-efficient large language models. In this work, we use the double descent phenomenon to holistically compare the sample efficiency of discrete diffusion and autoregressive models. We show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Ahmad Fraij , Sam Dauncey

Generative AI has redefined artificial intelligence, enabling the creation of innovative content and customized solutions that drive business practices into a new era of efficiency and creativity. In this paper, we focus on diffusion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Zihao Li , Hui Yuan , Kaixuan Huang , Chengzhuo Ni , Yinyu Ye , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang

We present a controlled empirical comparison between autoregressive (AR) and masked diffusion (MDLM) language models. Both models are trained on identical data (50M tokens from TinyStories), identical compute budget (20,000 steps, batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caio Vicentino

Diffusion models are a new class of generative models that have shown outstanding performance in image generation literature. As a consequence, studies have attempted to apply diffusion models to other tasks, such as speech enhancement. A…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-10 Philippe Gonzalez , Zheng-Hua Tan , Jan Østergaard , Jesper Jensen , Tommy Sonne Alstrøm , Tobias May

In this report, we explore the potential for text diffusion to replace autoregressive (AR) decoding for the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). We are particularly interested to see whether pretrained AR models can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Kehang Han , Kathleen Kenealy , Aditya Barua , Noah Fiedel , Noah Constant

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative approaches for missing-data imputation, yet most existing methods operate directly in data space and degrade when training data are heavily incomplete. We investigate whether shifting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Alberte Heering Estad , Ignacio Peis , Jes Frellsen

Diffusion models have demonstrated appealing performance in both image and video generation. However, many works discover that they struggle to capture important, high-level relationships that are present in the real world. For example,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Xunpeng Huang , Yujin Han , Difan Zou , Yian Ma , Tong Zhang

While inference-time scaling through search has revolutionized Large Language Models, translating these gains to image generation has proven difficult. Recent attempts to apply search strategies to continuous diffusion models show limited…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Erik Riise , Mehmet Onurcan Kaya , Dim P. Papadopoulos

Despite a growing interest in diffusion-based language models, existing work has not shown that these models can attain nontrivial likelihoods on standard language modeling benchmarks. In this work, we take the first steps towards closing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Ishaan Gulrajani , Tatsunori B. Hashimoto

Learning from a large corpus of data, pre-trained models have achieved impressive progress nowadays. As popular generative pre-training, diffusion models capture both low-level visual knowledge and high-level semantic relations. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Chaofan Ma , Yuhuan Yang , Chen Ju , Fei Zhang , Jinxiang Liu , Yu Wang , Ya Zhang , Yanfeng Wang

Autoregressive (AR) language models build representations incrementally via left-to-right prediction, while diffusion language models (dLLMs) are trained through full-sequence denoising. Although recent dLLMs match AR performance, whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Raghavv Goel , Risheek Garrepalli , Sudhanshu Agrawal , Chris Lott , Mingu Lee , Fatih Porikli

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