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Related papers: Sequential Diffusion Language Models

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Under strictly controlled pre-training settings, we observe a Crossover: when unique data is limited, diffusion language models (DLMs) consistently surpass autoregressive (AR) models by training for more epochs. The crossover shifts later…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Jinjie Ni , Qian Liu , Longxu Dou , Chao Du , Zili Wang , Hang Yan , Tianyu Pang , Michael Qizhe Shieh

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…

We present CadLLM, a training-free method to accelerate the inference throughput of diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs). We first investigate the dynamic nature of token unmasking confidence across blocks and steps. Based on this observation, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Jucheng Shen , Gaurav Sarkar , Yeonju Ro , Sharath Nittur Sridhar , Zhangyang Wang , Aditya Akella , Souvik Kundu

Improving the controllability, portability, and inference speed of diffusion language models (DLMs) is a key challenge in natural language generation. While recent research has shown significant success in complex text generation with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Cheng Kang , Xinye Chen , Yong Hu , Daniel Novak

Diffusion model, a new generative modelling paradigm, has achieved great success in image, audio, and video generation. However, considering the discrete categorical nature of text, it is not trivial to extend continuous diffusion models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Hongyi Yuan , Zheng Yuan , Chuanqi Tan , Fei Huang , Songfang Huang

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive language models by enabling parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, their inference speed is significantly limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Satyam Goyal , Kushal Patel , Tanush Mittal , Arjun Laxman

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have inspired new paradigms for document reranking. While this paradigm better exploits the reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, most existing LLM-based rerankers rely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qi Liu , Kun Ai , Jiaxin Mao , Yanzhao Zhang , Mingxin Li , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Fengbin Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, but extending these methods to diffusion language models (DLMs) is challenging due to intractable sequence-level likelihoods. Existing…

Recently, neural speech codecs (NSCs) trained as generative models have shown superior performance compared to conventional codecs at low bitrates. Although most state-of-the-art NSCs are trained as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs),…

Sound · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Pietro Foti , Andreas Brendel

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which offer bidirectional context and flexible masked-denoising generation, are emerging as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs. However, like AR LLMs, their model sizes continue to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Tianao Zhang , Zhiteng Li , Xianglong Yan , Haotong Qin , Yong Guo , Yulun Zhang

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) enable parallel text generation by iteratively denoising a fully masked sequence, unmasking a subset of masked tokens at each step. Existing decoding strategies rely on static confidence metrics…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yue Wu , Jian Huang

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

As large language models (LLMs) scale up, accuracy improves, but the autoregressive (AR) nature of decoding increases latency since each token requires a serial forward pass. Speculative decoding addresses this by employing a fast drafter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Guanghao Li , Zhihui Fu , Min Fang , Qibin Zhao , Ming Tang , Chun Yuan , Jun Wang

While LLM-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) achieves high accuracy, its speed is limited by sequential autoregressive decoding. Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a parallel alternative, yet their decoding strategies remain…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-29 Jeong Hun Yeo , Minsu Kim , Hyeongseop Rha , Yong Man Ro

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, order-agnostic generation with iterative refinement, offering a flexible alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, adapting reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Kevin Rojas , Jiahe Lin , Kashif Rasul , Anderson Schneider , Yuriy Nevmyvaka , Molei Tao , Wei Deng

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently achieved strong results in text generation. However, their multi-step sampling leads to slow inference, limiting practical use. To address this, we extend Inverse Distillation, a technique…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 David Li , Nikita Gushchin , Dmitry Abulkhanov , Eric Moulines , Ivan Oseledets , Maxim Panov , Alexander Korotin

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) approaches, enabling parallel token generation beyond a rigid left-to-right order. Despite growing empirical success, the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yunxiao Zhao , Changxiao Cai

While Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) relying on token masking and unmasking have shown promise in language modeling, their computational efficiency and generation flexibility remain constrained by the masking paradigm. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Fangyu Ding , Ding Ding , Sijin Chen , Kaibo Wang , Peng Xu , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Kai Han , Youliang Yan , Binhang Yuan , Jiacheng Sun

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

Block discrete diffusion language models factorize a sequence autoregressively over fixed-size positional blocks, decoupling within-block parallel denoising from across-block conditioning. We argue that this rigid partition wastes structure…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Yichen Zhu , Xiaoming Shi , Peng Zhao , Weiyu Chen , Debing Zhang , James Kwok