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Autoregressive (AR) generation is the standard decoding paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), but its token-by-token nature limits parallelism at inference time. Diffusion Language Models (DLLMs) offer parallel decoding by recovering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Aiwei Liu , Minghua He , Shaoxun Zeng , Sijun Zhang , Linhao Zhang , Chuhan Wu , Wei Jia , Yuan Liu , Xiao Zhou , Jie Zhou

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Guangxuan Xiao , Yuandong Tian , Beidi Chen , Song Han , Mike Lewis

Current autoregressive language models (ARMs) achieve high accuracy but require long token sequences, making them costly. Discrete diffusion language models (DDLMs) enable parallel and flexible generation within a fixed number of steps and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lina Berrayana , Ahmed Heakl , Muhammad Abdullah Sohail , Thomas Hofmann , Salman Khan , Wei Chen

Modern LLM pre-training consumes vast amounts of compute and training data, making the scaling behavior, or scaling laws, of different models a key distinguishing factor. Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) have been proposed as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Dimitri von Rütte , Janis Fluri , Omead Pooladzandi , Bernhard Schölkopf , Thomas Hofmann , Antonio Orvieto

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) deliver strong long-context processing capability in a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. However, the considerable computational cost of bidirectional full attention limits the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lingkun Long , Yushi Huang , Shihao Bai , Ruihao Gong , Jun Zhang , Ao Zhou , Jianlei Yang

Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models, benefiting from large scale pre-training and post-training, have begun to surpass BERT and T5-based models on general-purpose text embedding tasks such as document retrieval. However, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Siyue Zhang , Yilun Zhao , Liyuan Geng , Arman Cohan , Anh Tuan Luu , Chen Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Mahdi Karami , Ali Ghodsi

While diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARs), existing open-source DLMs suffer from high inference latency. This bottleneck is mainly due to the attention's quadratic complexity with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zeqing Wang , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Xingyi Yang , Xinchao Wang

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiyeon Kim , Sungik Choi , Yongrae Jo , Moontae Lee , Minjoon Seo

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

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising parallel generation paradigm but suffer from slow inference due to numerous refinement steps and the inability to use standard KV caching. We introduce CDLM (Consistency Diffusion Language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Minseo Kim , Chenfeng Xu , Coleman Hooper , Harman Singh , Ben Athiwaratkun , Ce Zhang , Kurt Keutzer , Amir Gholami

Autoregressive Models (ARMs) have long dominated the landscape of Large Language Models. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in the form of diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs), which generate text by iteratively denoising masked…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Zhiyuan Liu , Yicun Yang , Yaojie Zhang , Junjie Chen , Chang Zou , Qingyuan Wei , Shaobo Wang , Linfeng Zhang

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Chunsan Hong , Sanghyun Lee , Chieh-Hsin Lai , Satoshi Hayakawa , Yuhta Takida , Yuki Mitsufuji , Seungryong Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation and bidirectional context, yet they underperform autoregressive (AR) models in both likelihood modeling and generated text quality. We identify that this performance gap arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Hanzhi Zhang , Heng Fan , Kewei Sha , Yan Huang , Yunhe Feng

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

The pursuit of real-time agentic interaction has driven interest in Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) as alternatives to auto-regressive backbones, promising to break the sequential latency bottleneck. However, does such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Qingyu Lu , Liang Ding , Kanjian Zhang , Jinxia Zhang , Dacheng Tao

Attention is a fundamental component behind the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs). However, our current understanding of the attention mechanism, especially regarding how attention distributions are established,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Zhongzhi Yu , Zheng Wang , Yonggan Fu , Huihong Shi , Khalid Shaikh , Yingyan Celine Lin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Anej Svete , Ashish Sabharwal

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer attractive advantages over Auto-Regressive (AR) models, such as full-attention parallel decoding and flexible generation. However, standard DLM training uses a static, single-step masked prediction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zehua Pei , Hui-Ling Zhen , Weizhe Lin , Sinno Jialin Pan , Yunhe Wang , Mingxuan Yuan , Bei Yu