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Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved great success in image generation but suffer from high inference latency due to their iterative denoising nature. Motivated by the evolving feature dynamics across the denoising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Haodong He , Yuan Gao , Weizhong Zhang , Gui-Song Xia

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) offer flexible, non-autoregressive generation, but this freedom introduces a challenge: final output quality is highly sensitive to the decoding order. We are the first to formalize this issue, attributing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Ziyu Chen , Xinbei Jiang , Peng Sun , Tao Lin

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) promise fast, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing samplers, which pick tokens to unmask based on model confidence, ignore interactions when unmasking multiple positions in parallel and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Omer Luxembourg , Haim Permuter , Eliya Nachmani

We present a systematic theoretical framework that interprets masked diffusion models (MDMs) as solutions to energy minimization problems in discrete optimal transport. Specifically, we prove that three distinct energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Sitong Chen , Shen Nie , Jiacheng Sun , Zijin Feng , Zhenguo Li , Ji-Rong Wen , Chongxuan Li

We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Shiyu Wang , Haolin Chen , Liangwei Yang , Jielin Qiu , Rithesh Murthy , Ming Zhu , Zixiang Chen , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Shelby Heinecke , Huan Wang

Part of the success of diffusion models stems from their ability to perform iterative refinement, i.e., repeatedly correcting outputs during generation. However, modern masked discrete diffusion lacks this capability: when a token is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guanghan Wang , Yair Schiff , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Volodymyr Kuleshov

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…

Recent Speech Large Language Models~(LLMs) have achieved impressive capabilities in end-to-end speech interaction. However, the prevailing autoregressive paradigm imposes strict serial constraints, limiting generation efficiency and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ziyang Cheng , Yuhao Wang , Heyang Liu , Ronghua Wu , Qunshan Gu , Yanfeng Wang , Yu Wang

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

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate text by iteratively selecting positions to unmask and then predicting tokens at those positions. Yet MDMs lack proper likelihood evaluation: the evidence lower bound (ELBO) is not only a loose bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Gilad Turok , Chris De Sa , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Discrete flow models (DFMs) are a class of flexible generative models for generating discrete data, and diffusion large language models (dLLMs) can be viewed as a special case with a specific choice of mixture path and a masked source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zhengyan Wan , Yidong Ouyang , Panwen Hu , Qiang Sun

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

Controllable diffusion generation often relies on various heuristics that are seemingly disconnected without a unified understanding. We bridge this gap with Diffusion Controller (DiffCon), a unified control-theoretic view that casts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Tong Yang , Moonkyung Ryu , Chih-Wei Hsu , Guy Tennenholtz , Yuejie Chi , Craig Boutilier , Bo Dai

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zachary Horvitz , Raghav Singhal , Hao Zou , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Zhou Yu , Rajesh Ranganath , Kathleen McKeown

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to dominant autoregressive approaches. Although they achieve competitive performance on several tasks, a substantial gap remains in open-ended text generation.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Mengyu Ye , Ryosuke Takahashi , Keito Kudo , Jun Suzuki

Optimizing discrete diffusion model (DDM) with rewards remains a challenge: the non-autoregressive paradigm makes importance sampling intractable and rollout complex, puzzling reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Tianren Ma , Mu Zhang , Yibing Wang , Qixiang Ye

Recent Uniform State Diffusion Models (USDMs), initialized from a uniform prior, offer the promise of fast text generation due to their inherent self-correction ability compared to masked diffusion models. However, they still rely on…

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) and their extensions have emerged as competitive generative models yet confront challenges of efficient sampling. We propose a new bilateral denoising diffusion model (BDDM) that parameterizes both the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-28 Max W. Y. Lam , Jun Wang , Dan Su , Dong Yu

Generative models capture the true distribution of data, yielding semantically rich representations. Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) exhibit superior generative capabilities, though efficient representation learning for them are lacking.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Limai Jiang , Yunpeng Cai

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) accelerate text generation by unmasking multiple tokens in parallel. However, parallel decoding introduces a distributional mismatch: it approximates the joint conditional using a fully factorized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Liran Ringel , Ameen Ali , Yaniv Romano