English
Related papers

Related papers: Attention Sinks in Diffusion Language Models

200 papers

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

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

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive approaches, enabling parallel text generation with competitive performance. Despite these advantages, there is a critical instability in DLMs: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zihou Zhang , Zheyong Xie , Li Zhong , Haifeng Liu , Yao Hu , Shaosheng Cao

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive language models (ARMs), yet the intrinsic differences in their generated text remain underexplored. We first find empirically that off-the-shelf DLMs exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zeyang Zhang , Chengwei Liang , Xingyan Chen , Meiqi Gu , Minrui Luo , Jingzhao Zhang , Tianxing He

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 (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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Tianyi Li , Mingda Chen , Bowei Guo , Zhiqiang Shen

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) incur high inference cost due to iterative denoising, motivating efficient pruning. Existing pruning heuristics largely inherited from autoregressive (AR) LLMs, typically preserve attention sink tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Aidar Myrzakhan , Tianyi Li , Bowei Guo , Shengkun Tang , Zhiqiang Shen

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…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Julianna Piskorz , Cristina Pinneri , Alvaro Correia , Motasem Alfarra , Risheek Garrepalli , Christos Louizos

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…

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) enable parallel token decoding, providing a promising alternative to the sequential nature of autoregressive generation. However, their iterative denoising process remains computationally expensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Younjoo Lee , Junghoo Lee , Seungkyun Dan , Jaiyoung Park , Jung Ho Ahn

Language Models (LMs) assign significant attention to the first token, even if it is not semantically important, which is known as attention sink. This phenomenon has been widely adopted in applications such as streaming/long context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Xiangming Gu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Qian Liu , Fengzhuo Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Ye Wang , Min Lin

Attention sinks -- tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass -- are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fangzheng Wu , Brian Summa

Auto-regressive models (ARMs) have established a dominant paradigm in language modeling. However, their strictly sequential decoding paradigm imposes fundamental constraints on both inference efficiency and modeling flexibility. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Yuyan Zhou , Kai Syun Hou , Weiyu Chen , James Kwok

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

While Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising non-autoregressive paradigm comparable to autoregressive (AR) models, their faithfulness, specifically regarding hallucination, remains largely underexplored. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhengnan Guo , Fei Tan

The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Injin Kong , Hyoungjoon Lee , Yohan Jo

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Han Peng , Peiyu Liu , Zican Dong , Daixuan Cheng , Junyi Li , Yiru Tang , Shuo Wang , Wayne Xin Zhao

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) decoding with appealing efficiency and modeling properties, yet their implications for agentic multi-step decision making remain underexplored. We…

‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›