Related papers: On Powerful Ways to Generate: Autoregression, Diff…

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…

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…

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…

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 (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)…

Diffusion language models enable any-order generation and bidirectional conditioning, offering appealing flexibility for tasks such as infilling, rewriting, and self-correction. However, their formulation-predicting one part of a sequence…

Autoregressive language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggle with complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We introduce discrete diffusion models as a novel solution to these challenges. Through the lens of subgoal…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including document processing and code generation. Autoregressive Language Models (ARMs), which generate…

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…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models over discrete domains. MDMs generate sequences in an any-order, parallel fashion, enabling fast inference and strong performance on…

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…

Autoregressive models (ARMs) and diffusion models (DMs) represent two leading paradigms in generative modeling, each excelling in distinct areas: ARMs in global context modeling and long-sequence generation, and DMs in generating…

LLMs have become the mainstream approaches to code generation. Existing LLMs mainly employ autoregressive generation, i.e. generating code token-by-token from left to right. However, the underlying autoregressive generation has two…

Masked diffusion models (MDM) are powerful generative models for discrete data that generate samples by progressively unmasking tokens in a sequence. Each token can take one of two states: masked or unmasked. We observe that token sequences…

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…

In recent years, masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative approach for generative modeling over discrete domains. Compared to autoregressive models (ARMs), MDMs trade off complexity at training time with…

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…

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…

In arbitrary-order language models, it is an open question how to sample tokens in parallel from the correct joint distribution. With discrete diffusion models, the more tokens they generate in parallel, the less their predicted…