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Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm. By generating tokens in parallel through an iterative denoising process, DLMs possess inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Tianyi Li , Mingda Chen , Bowei Guo , Zhiqiang Shen

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

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 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

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are often advertised as enabling parallel token generation, yet practical fast DLMs frequently converge to left-to-right, autoregressive (AR)-like decoding dynamics. In contrast, genuinely non-AR generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Pengxiang Li , Dilxat Muhtar , Tianlong Chen , Lu Yin , Shiwei Liu

Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Houxing Ren , Mingjie Zhan , Zimu Lu , Ke Wang , Yunqiao Yang , Haotian Hou , Junting Pan , Hongsheng Li

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to dominant autoregressive approaches. Although they achieve competitive performance on several tasks, a substantial gap remains in open-ended text generation.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Mengyu Ye , Ryosuke Takahashi , Keito Kudo , Jun Suzuki

Denoising language models (DLMs) have been proposed as a powerful alternative to traditional language models (LMs) for automatic speech recognition (ASR), motivated by their ability to use bidirectional context and adapt to a specific ASR…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Dorian Koch , Albert Zeyer , Nick Rossenbach , Ralf Schlüter , Hermann Ney

Autoregressive (AR) language models enforce a fixed left-to-right generation order, creating a fundamental limitation when the required output structure conflicts with natural reasoning (e.g., producing answers before explanations due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Longxuan Yu , Yu Fu , Shaorong Zhang , Hui Liu , Mukund Varma T , Greg Ver Steeg , Yue Dong

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently demonstrated capabilities that complement standard autoregressive (AR) models, particularly in non-sequential generation and bidirectional editing. Although recent work has shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Fred Zhangzhi Peng , Alexis Fox , Anru R. Zhang , Alexander Tong

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) promise fast, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing samplers, which pick tokens to unmask based on model confidence, ignore interactions when unmasking multiple positions in parallel and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Omer Luxembourg , Haim Permuter , Eliya Nachmani

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Dawen Liang , Wenpin Tang , David Yao , Nathan Kallus

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

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing DLM mixture-of-experts (MoE) models inherit token-choice (TC) routing from autoregressive systems, leading to load imbalance and rigid…

Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that enables parallel, non-autoregressive generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To…

Recently, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have shown promising potential across vision, language, and cross-modal generation. However, a notable discrepancy exists between their training and inference procedures. In particular, MDM inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Renping Zhou , Zanlin Ni , Tianyi Chen , Zeyu Liu , Yang Yue , Yulin Wang , Yuxuan Wang , Jingshu Liu , Gao Huang

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

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

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems based on large language models (LLMs) achieve superior performance by leveraging pretrained LLMs as decoders, but their token-by-token generation mechanism leads to inference latency that grows…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Wenjie Tian , Bingshen Mu , Guobin Ma , Xuelong Geng , Zhixian Zhao , Lei Xie

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) promise fast parallel generation, yet open-source DLLMs still face a severe quality-speed trade-off: accelerating decoding by revealing multiple tokens often causes substantial quality degradation. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Fanqin Zeng , Feng Hong , Geng Yu , Huangjie Zheng , Xiaofeng Cao , Ya Zhang , Bo Han , Yanfeng Wang , Jiangchao Yao