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Related papers: A Survey on Diffusion Language Models

200 papers

Diffusion-based large language models (Diffusion LLMs) have shown promise for non-autoregressive text generation with parallel decoding capabilities. However, the practical inference speed of open-sourced Diffusion LLMs often lags behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Chengyue Wu , Hao Zhang , Shuchen Xue , Zhijian Liu , Shizhe Diao , Ligeng Zhu , Ping Luo , Song Han , Enze Xie

Unlike autoregressive language models, which terminate variable-length generation upon predicting an End-of-Sequence (EoS) token, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) operate over a fixed maximum-length context window for a predetermined number…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Vittorio Rossi , Giacomo Cirò , Davide Beltrame , Luca Gandolfi , Paul Röttger , Dirk Hovy

Recent byte-level language models (LMs) match the performance of token-level models without relying on subword vocabularies, yet their utility is limited by slow, byte-by-byte autoregressive generation. We address this bottleneck in the…

The modern autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance on NLP benchmarks, and they are deployed in the real world. However, they still suffer from limitations of the autoregressive training paradigm.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Justin Deschenaux , Caglar Gulcehre

Diffusion Models (DMs) have disrupted the image Super-Resolution (SR) field and further closed the gap between image quality and human perceptual preferences. They are easy to train and can produce very high-quality samples that exceed the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Brian B. Moser , Arundhati S. Shanbhag , Federico Raue , Stanislav Frolov , Sebastian Palacio , Andreas Dengel

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer faster generation than autoregressive models while maintaining comparable quality, but existing watermarking methods fail on them due to their non-sequential decoding. Unlike autoregressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Linyu Wu , Linhao Zhong , Wenjie Qu , Yuexin Li , Yue Liu , Shengfang Zhai , Chunhua Shen , Jiaheng Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their reasoning ability through chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, LLM's autoregressive decoding may limit the ability to revisit and refine earlier tokens in a holistic manner, which can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Haoqiang Kang , Yizhe Zhang , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Nicklas Majamaki , Navdeep Jaitly , Yi-An Ma , Lianhui Qin

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential in language modeling, offering various advantages over traditional autoregressive approaches. Their ability to generate and revise entire responses in parallel enables faster generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Michael Hersche , Samuel Moor-Smith , Thomas Hofmann , Abbas Rahimi

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 language models (DLMs) have strong theoretical efficiency but are limited by fixed-length decoding and incompatibility with key-value (KV) caches. Block diffusion mitigates these issues, yet still enforces a fixed block size and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yangzhou Liu , Yue Cao , Hao Li , Gen Luo , Zhe Chen , Weiyun Wang , Xiaobo Liang , Biqing Qi , Lijun Wu , Changyao Tian , Yanting Zhang , Yuqiang Li , Tong Lu , Yu Qiao , Jifeng Dai , Wenhai Wang

The exponential growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to highlight the need for efficient strategies to meet ever-expanding computational and data demands. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of two complementary…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have shown advantages in text generation, particularly due to their inherent ability for parallel decoding. However, constrained by the quality--speed trade-off, existing inference solutions adopt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Lizhuo Luo , Zhuoran Shi , Jiajun Luo , Zhi Wang , Shen Ren , Wenya Wang , Tianwei Zhang

While autoregressive Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success, their sequential generation often limits their efficacy in complex visual planning and dynamic robotic control. In this work, we investigate the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Jiacheng Ye , Shansan Gong , Jiahui Gao , Junming Fan , Shuang Wu , Wei Bi , Haoli Bai , Lifeng Shang , Lingpeng Kong

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for text generation and are becoming a competitive alternative to autoregressive models. The denoising strategy plays an important role in determining the quality of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Haojin Yang , Rui Hu , Zequn Sun , Rui Zhou , Yujun Cai , Yiwei Wang

The tremendous progress in neural image generation, coupled with the emergence of seemingly omnipotent vision-language models has finally enabled text-based interfaces for creating and editing images. Handling generic images requires a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Omri Avrahami , Ohad Fried , Dani Lischinski

Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a structural alternative to autoregressive generation: denoising can update tokens in arbitrary orders or in parallel rather than along a fixed left-to-right chain. In practice, fast DLM decoding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jeonseong Kim

Diffusion language models intrinsically fail to capture correlations between decoded tokens, which leads to a harsh trade-off between sampling quality and throughput. To solve this issue, we propose DiLaDiff, a variant of masked diffusion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jean-Marie Lemercier , Tomas Geffner , Karsten Kreis , Morteza Mardani , Arash Vahdat , Ante Jukić

Recently, Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have demonstrated unique efficiency advantages, enabled by their inherently parallel decoding mechanism and flexible generation paradigm. Meanwhile, despite the rapid advancement of Search…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jiahao Zhao , Shaoxuan Xu , Zhongxiang Sun , Fengqi Zhu , Jingyang Ou , Yuling Shi , Chongxuan Li , Xiao Zhang , Jun Xu

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful new family of deep generative models with record-breaking performance in many applications, including image synthesis, video generation, and molecule design. In this survey, we provide an overview…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Ling Yang , Zhilong Zhang , Yang Song , Shenda Hong , Runsheng Xu , Yue Zhao , Wentao Zhang , Bin Cui , Ming-Hsuan Yang

While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images, prior work reports a significant performance gap between diffusion and autoregressive (AR) methods in language modeling. In this work, we show that simple masked discrete…