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Related papers: Attention Sinks in Diffusion Language Models

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Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Seil Kang , Jinyeong Kim , Junhyeok Kim , Seong Jae Hwang

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) provide a fast and flexible alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) via iterative denoising with parallel updates. However, their evaluation is challenging: existing metrics conflate denoiser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Luhan Tang , Longxuan Yu , Shaorong Zhang , Greg Ver Steeg

Most multi-agent systems rely exclusively on autoregressive language models (ARMs) that are based on sequential generation. Although effective for fluent text, ARMs limit global reasoning and plan revision. On the other hand, Discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Lina Berrayana , Ahmed Heakl , Abdullah Sohail , Thomas Hofmann , Salman Khan , Wei Chen

Practitioners have consistently observed three puzzling phenomena in transformer-based large language models (LLMs): attention sinks, value-state drains, and residual-state peaks, collectively referred to as extreme-token phenomena. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Tianyu Guo , Druv Pai , Yu Bai , Jiantao Jiao , Michael I. Jordan , Song Mei

While Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are theoretically well-suited for iterative refinement due to their non-causal structure, they often fail to reliably revise incorrect tokens in practice. The key challenge lies in the model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Shuibai Zhang , Fred Zhangzhi Peng , Yiheng Zhang , Jin Pan , Grigorios G. Chrysos

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Kaihua Liang , Xin Tan , An Zhong , Hong Xu , Marco Canini

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)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Jia-Nan Li , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Chongxuan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to attend heavily to the first token in the sequence -- creating a so-called attention sink. Many works have studied this phenomenon in detail, proposing various ways to either leverage or alleviate it.…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as an alternative modeling paradigm to autoregressive (AR) language models, enabling parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling. Yet their security implications,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Shengfang Zhai , Xiaoyang Ji , Yuling Shi , Haoran Gao , Fanyu Meng , Yan Zeng , Yuejian Fang , Yinpeng Dong , Jiaheng Zhang

The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Álvaro Rodríguez Abella , João Pedro Silvestre , Paulo Tabuada

Embedding models are a fundamental component of modern AI systems such as semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation. Recent advances in large foundation models have substantially accelerated the development of embedding models,…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Zihang Wang , Siyue Zhang , Yilun Zhao , Jingyi Yang , Tingyu Song , Anh Tuan Luu , Chen Zhao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caio Vicentino

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

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) have been shown to memorize and occasionally reproduce training data verbatim, raising concerns about privacy and copyright liability. Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xiaoyu Luo , Wenrui Yu , Qiongxiu Li , Johannes Bjerva

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as competitive alternatives to autoregressive (AR) language models, yet differences in their activation dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize these dynamics in LLaDA-8B and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Alexander Conzelmann , Albert Catalan-Tatjer , Shiwei Liu

Diffusion Language models (DLMs) are a promising avenue for text generation due to their practical properties on tractable controllable generation. They also have the advantage of not having to predict text autoregressively. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Sofia Maria Lo Cicero Vaina , Nikita Balagansky , Daniil Gavrilov

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Guhao Feng , Yihan Geng , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Liwei Wang , Di He

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements, with the test-time scaling law consistently enhancing the reasoning capabilities. Through systematic evaluation and exploration of a diverse spectrum of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Chenyang Shao , Sijian Ren , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) tasks, yet most NL2SQL systems continue to rely on the autoregressive (AR) paradigm. The highly structured nature of SQL makes…

Databases · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Peixian Ma , Xialie Zhuang , Jiantao Tan , Changlun Li , Ruirui Chen , Chengwei Qin

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have inspired new paradigms for document reranking. While this paradigm better exploits the reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, most existing LLM-based rerankers rely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qi Liu , Kun Ai , Jiaxin Mao , Yanzhao Zhang , Mingxin Li , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Fengbin Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen