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Previously, non-autoregressive models were widely perceived as being superior in generation efficiency but inferior in generation quality due to the difficulties of modeling multiple target modalities. To enhance the multi-modality modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Lihua Qian , Mingxuan Wang , Yang Liu , Hao Zhou

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, achieving state-of-the-art results in continuous data domains such as image and video generation. Their core mechanism involves a forward diffusion process that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Ashen Weligalle

Non-autoregressive (NAR) text generation has attracted much attention in the field of natural language processing, which greatly reduces the inference latency but has to sacrifice the generation accuracy. Recently, diffusion models, a class…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Yifan Li , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Talking head generation with arbitrary identities and speech audio remains a crucial problem in the realm of the virtual metaverse. Recently, diffusion models have become a popular generative technique in this field with their strong…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Xinyang Li , Gen Li , Zhihui Lin , Yichen Qian , GongXin Yao , Weinan Jia , Aowen Wang , Weihua Chen , Fan Wang

Diffusion models offer appealing properties for language generation, such as parallel decoding and iterative refinement, but the discrete and highly structured nature of text challenges the direct application of diffusion principles. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Ziqi Jin , Bin Wang , Xiang Lin , Lidong Bing , Aixin Sun

Diffusion models have achieved great success in modeling continuous data modalities such as images, audio, and video, but have seen limited use in discrete domains such as language. Recent attempts to adapt diffusion to language have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Justin Lovelace , Varsha Kishore , Chao Wan , Eliot Shekhtman , Kilian Q. Weinberger

Autoregressive language models are the currently dominant paradigm for text generation, but they have some fundamental limitations that cannot be remedied by scale-for example inherently sequential and unidirectional generation. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Yuchen Li , Alexandre Kirchmeyer , Aashay Mehta , Yilong Qin , Boris Dadachev , Kishore Papineni , Sanjiv Kumar , Andrej Risteski

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation while achieving competitive performance. Despite these advantages, MDMs face a fundamental limitation: once…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yair Schiff , Omer Belhasin , Roy Uziel , Guanghan Wang , Marianne Arriola , Gilad Turok , Michael Elad , Volodymyr Kuleshov

In this work, we propose Causal Autoregressive Diffusion (CARD), a novel framework that unifies the training efficiency of ARMs with the high-throughput inference of diffusion models. CARD reformulates the diffusion process within a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Junhao Ruan , Bei Li , Yongjing Yin , Pengcheng Huang , Xin Chen , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Tong Xiao , JingBo Zhu

Recent studies have shown that diffusion language models achieve remarkable data efficiency under limited-data constraints, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. In this work, we perform extensive ablation experiments to disentangle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zitian Gao , Haoming Luo , Lynx Chen , Jason Klein Liu , Ran Tao , Joey Zhou , Bryan Dai

Multimodal generative models that can understand and generate across multiple modalities are dominated by autoregressive (AR) approaches, which process tokens sequentially from left to right, or top to bottom. These models jointly handle…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Alexander Swerdlow , Mihir Prabhudesai , Siddharth Gandhi , Deepak Pathak , Katerina Fragkiadaki

Diffusion models have gained tremendous success in text-to-image generation, yet still lag behind with visual understanding tasks, an area dominated by autoregressive vision-language models. We propose a large-scale and fully end-to-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Zijie Li , Henry Li , Yichun Shi , Amir Barati Farimani , Yuval Kluger , Linjie Yang , Peng Wang

Generative recommendation (GR) typically first quantizes continuous item embeddings into multi-level semantic IDs (SIDs), and then generates the next item via autoregressive decoding. Although existing methods are already competitive in…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Lingyu Mu , Hao Deng , Haibo Xing , Jinxin Hu , Yu Zhang , Xiaoyi Zeng , Jing Zhang

While Autoregressive (AR) Transformer-based Generative Language Models are frequently employed for lookahead tasks, recent research suggests a potential discrepancy in their ability to perform planning tasks that require multi-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Itamar Trainin , Shauli Ravfogel , Omri Abend , Amir Feder

Data-driven generative models excel in language and vision, but diffusion models often fail in constrained planning and design tasks, exhibiting severe constraint violations in engineering inverse design, molecular generation, multi-robot…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zirui Zhao , Boye Niu , Harold Soh , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) significantly accelerate inference by trading off sequential determinism. However, the theoretical mechanisms governing generation order and the risks inherent in parallelization remain under-explored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Shaorong Zhang , Longxuan Yu , Rob Brekelmans , Luhan Tang , Salman Asif , Greg Ver Steeg

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pengcheng Huang , Tianming Liu , Zhenghao Liu , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Tong Xiao , Zulong Chen , Maosong Sun

The bifurcation of generative modeling into autoregressive approaches for discrete data (text) and diffusion approaches for continuous data (images) hinders the development of truly unified multimodal systems. While Masked Language Models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yuanfeng Xu , Yuhao Chen , Liang Lin , Guangrun Wang

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yuxiang Wang , Yu Xiang , Baojian Zhou , Qifang Zhao , Keyue Jiang , Yanghua Xiao , Xiaoxiao Xu

Large diffusion vision-language models (LDVLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel decoding for efficient inference and leveraging bidirectional attention for global context. Despite…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Sujung Hong , Chanyong Yoon , Seong Jae Hwang