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Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation, which in turn presents new challenges for aligning them with human preferences. In this work, we aim to improve the policy optimization for dLLMs by…

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation and bidirectional context, yet they underperform autoregressive (AR) models in both likelihood modeling and generated text quality. We identify that this performance gap arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

This paper shows how diffusion language models (DLMs) can be used as effective and efficient retrievers. Existing DLM-based retrievers (e.g., DiffEmbed) follow BERT-style encoding, representing each query or passage as a single mean-pooled…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shuai Wang , Yu Yin , Shengyao Zhuang , Bevan Koopman , Guido Zuccon

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

Discrete diffusion models offer global context awareness and flexible parallel generation. However, uniform random noise schedulers in standard DLLM training overlook the highly non-uniform information density inherent in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Linrui Ma , Yufei Cui , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

Recent advances in diffusion language models (DLMs) have presented a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, DLMs still lag behind LLMs in reasoning performance, especially as the number of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Chenglong Wang , Yang Gan , Hang Zhou , Chi Hu , Yongyu Mu , Kai Song , Murun Yang , Bei Li , Chunliang Zhang , Tongran Liu , Jingbo Zhu , Zhengtao Yu , Tong Xiao

Diffusion-based decoding has recently emerged as an appealing alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, offering the potential to update multiple tokens in parallel and reduce latency. However, diffusion vision language models (dVLMs)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Lunbin Zeng , Jingfeng Yao , Bencheng Liao , Hongyuan Tao , Wenyu Liu , Xinggang Wang

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) provide a fast and flexible alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) via iterative denoising with parallel updates. However, their evaluation is challenging: existing metrics conflate denoiser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Luhan Tang , Longxuan Yu , Shaorong Zhang , Greg Ver Steeg

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text via iterative masked-token denoising, enabling mask-parallel decoding and distinct controllability and efficiency tradeoffs from autoregressive LLMs. Yet, efficient representation-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Adi Shnaidman , Erin Feiglin , Osher Yaari , Efrat Mentel , Amit Levi , Raz Lapid

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for faster inference via parallel token generation. We provide a rigorous foundation for this advantage by formalizing a model of parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haozhe Jiang , Nika Haghtalab , Lijie Chen

We study why continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) have lagged behind discrete diffusion approaches despite their appealing continuous generative dynamics. Under a controlled token--recovery study, we identify token rounding, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Junzhe Shen , Jieru Zhao , Ziwei He , Zhouhan Lin

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Julianna Piskorz , Cristina Pinneri , Alvaro Correia , Motasem Alfarra , Risheek Garrepalli , Christos Louizos

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…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) models, offering advantages such as accelerated parallel decoding and bidirectional context modeling. However, the vanilla…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Runchu Tian , Junxia Cui , Xueqiang Xu , Feng Yao , Jingbo Shang

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive language models (ARMs), yet the intrinsic differences in their generated text remain underexplored. We first find empirically that off-the-shelf DLMs exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zeyang Zhang , Chengwei Liang , Xingyan Chen , Meiqi Gu , Minrui Luo , Jingzhao Zhang , Tianxing He

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiyeon Kim , Sungik Choi , Yongrae Jo , Moontae Lee , Minjoon Seo

Recent masked diffusion language models (MDLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have achieved performance comparable to autoregressive large language models. Unlike autoregressive models, which generate text sequentially, MDLMs generate text by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Georu Lee , Seungwon Jeong , Hoki Kim , Jinseong Park , Woojin Lee

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

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

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…