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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…

Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform…

Diffusion language models are a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for faster generation. Among discrete diffusion approaches, Masked diffusion currently dominates, largely driven by strong perplexity on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Jean-Marie Lemercier , Zhihan Yang , Justin Deschenaux , Jingyu Liu , John Thickstun , Ante Jukic

One of the most compelling features of global discrete diffusion language models is their global bidirectional contextual capability. However, existing block-based diffusion studies tend to introduce autoregressive priors, which, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Linrui Ma , Yufei Cui , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Moongyu Jeon , Sangwoo Shin , BumJun Kim , Kyelim Lee , Albert No

Talking face generation has historically struggled to produce head movements and natural facial expressions without guidance from additional reference videos. Recent developments in diffusion-based generative models allow for more realistic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Michał Stypułkowski , Konstantinos Vougioukas , Sen He , Maciej Zięba , Stavros Petridis , Maja Pantic

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a popular research topic for generative modeling of discrete data, thanks to their superior performance over other discrete diffusion models, and are rivaling the auto-regressive models (ARMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Kaiwen Zheng , Yongxin Chen , Hanzi Mao , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Qinsheng Zhang

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

In sequence-to-sequence Transformer ASR, autoregressive (AR) models achieve strong accuracy but suffer from slow decoding, while non-autoregressive (NAR) models enable parallel decoding at the cost of degraded performance. We propose a…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-26 Hao Yen , Pin-Jui Ku , Ante Jukić , Sabato Marco Siniscalchi

Discrete diffusion models, like continuous diffusion models, generate high-quality samples by gradually undoing noise applied to datapoints with a Markov process. Gradual generation in theory comes with many conceptual benefits; for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alan N. Amin , Nate Gruver , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Diffusion language models hold the promise of fast parallel generation, while autoregressive (AR) models typically excel in quality due to their causal structure aligning naturally with language modeling. This raises a fundamental question:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jingyu Liu , Xin Dong , Zhifan Ye , Rishabh Mehta , Yonggan Fu , Vartika Singh , Jan Kautz , Ce Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov

We introduce Autoregressive Diffusion Models (ARDMs), a model class encompassing and generalizing order-agnostic autoregressive models (Uria et al., 2014) and absorbing discrete diffusion (Austin et al., 2021), which we show are special…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Emiel Hoogeboom , Alexey A. Gritsenko , Jasmijn Bastings , Ben Poole , Rianne van den Berg , Tim Salimans

This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the use of diffusion models in natural language processing (NLP). Diffusion models are a class of mathematical models that aim to capture the diffusion of information or signals across a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Hao Zou , Zae Myung Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Xin Dai , Pengcheng Huang , Zhenghao Liu , Shuo Wang , Yukun Yan , Chaojun Xiao , Yu Gu , Ge Yu , Maosong Sun

A major bottleneck of standard auto-regressive large language models is that their inference process is inherently sequential, resulting in very long and costly inference times. To circumvent this, practitioners proposed a class of language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sitan Chen , Kevin Cong , Jerry Li

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

Attention mechanisms that confer selective focus on a strict subset of input elements are nearly ubiquitous in language models today. We posit there to be downside to the use of attention: most input information is lost. In support of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Benjamin L. Badger

Diffusion models have shown remarkable success across a wide range of generative tasks. However, they often suffer from spatially inconsistent generation, arguably due to the inherent locality of their denoising mechanisms. This can yield…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Wenshuai Zhao , Zhiyuan Li , Yi Zhao , Mohammad Hassan Vali , Martin Trapp , Joni Pajarinen , Juho Kannala , Arno Solin

In this work, we provide a systematic survey of Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) and Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Language Models (dMLLMs). Unlike autoregressive (AR) models, dLLMs and dMLLMs adopt a multi-token, parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Runpeng Yu , Qi Li , Xinchao Wang

Diffusion language models promise parallel generation, yet still lag behind autoregressive (AR) models in quality. We stem this gap to a failure of introspective consistency: AR models agree with their own generations, while DLMs often do…