Related papers: Why mask diffusion does not work
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…
Autoregressive (AR) models have long dominated the landscape of large language models, driving progress across a wide range of tasks. Recently, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative, though their advantages…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising approach for language modeling, yet they face a performance gap compared to autoregressive models (ARMs) and require more training iterations. In this work, we present the…
Diffusion language models have emerged as a promising approach for text generation. One would naturally expect this method to be an efficient replacement for autoregressive models since multiple tokens can be sampled in parallel during each…
Diffusion language models offer unique benefits over autoregressive models due to their potential for parallelized generation and controllability, yet they lag in likelihood modeling and are limited to fixed-length generation. In this work,…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
This paper combines autoregressive and masked-diffusion training objectives without any architectural modifications, resulting in flexible language models that outperform single-objective models. Autoregressive modeling has been a popular…
Masked (or absorbing) diffusion is actively explored as an alternative to autoregressive models for generative modeling of discrete data. However, existing work in this area has been hindered by unnecessarily complex model formulations and…
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…
Diffusion language models have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models. Beyond next-token generation, they are more efficient and flexible by enabling parallel and any-order token generation. However,…
Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…
Post-training pretrained autoregressive models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) has emerged as a cost-effective way to overcome the limitations of sequential generation. Yet it remains unclear whether post-trained MDMs acquire…
Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models, benefiting from large scale pre-training and post-training, have begun to surpass BERT and T5-based models on general-purpose text embedding tasks such as document retrieval. However, a…
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…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…
Autoregressive models excel in modeling sequential dependencies by enforcing causal constraints, yet they struggle to capture complex bidirectional patterns due to their unidirectional nature. In contrast, mask-based models leverage…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) for text offer a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive language models. Parallel generation makes them efficient, but their computational capabilities and the limitations inherent in their…