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Related papers: Soft-Masked Diffusion Language Models

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Discrete diffusion language models have shown strong potential for text generation, yet standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) misaligns with their semi-autoregressive inference: training randomly masks tokens across the entire response,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bowen Sun , Yujun Cai , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Yiwei Wang

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for generative modeling over discrete domains. It is known that MDMs effectively train to decode tokens in a random order, and that this ordering has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Prateek Garg , Bhavya Kohli , Sunita Sarawagi

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

We present DiffusionBERT, a new generative masked language model based on discrete diffusion models. Diffusion models and many pre-trained language models have a shared training objective, i.e., denoising, making it possible to combine the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Zhengfu He , Tianxiang Sun , Kuanning Wang , Xuanjing Huang , Xipeng Qiu

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

While Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) relying on token masking and unmasking have shown promise in language modeling, their computational efficiency and generation flexibility remain constrained by the masking paradigm. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Fangyu Ding , Ding Ding , Sijin Chen , Kaibo Wang , Peng Xu , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Kai Han , Youliang Yan , Binhang Yuan , Jiacheng Sun

In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought prompting improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs). These typically come at the cost of longer, more expensive prompts that may contain redundant information. Prompt compression based on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Caleb Zheng , Jyotika Singh , Fang Tu , Weiyi Sun , Sujeeth Bharadwaj , Yassine Benajiba , Sujith Ravi , Eli Shlizerman , Dan Roth

Diffusion language models, as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive (AR) models, enable faster generation and richer conditioning on bidirectional context. However, they suffer from a key discrepancy between training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Haoyu He , Katrin Renz , Yong Cao , Andreas Geiger

Diffusion language models offer parallel token generation and inherent bidirectionality, promising more efficient and powerful sequence modeling compared to autoregressive approaches. However, state-of-the-art diffusion models (e.g., Dream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Zhanqiu Hu , Jian Meng , Yash Akhauri , Mohamed S. Abdelfattah , Jae-sun Seo , Zhiru Zhang , Udit Gupta

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a novel framework for language modeling. MDMs generate sentences by iteratively denoising masked sequences, filling in [MASK] tokens step by step. Although MDMs support any-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Chunsan Hong , Seonho An , Min-Soo Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate discrete sequences by iterative denoising under an absorbing masking process. In standard masked diffusion, if a token remains masked after a reverse update, the model discards its clean-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Michael Cardei , Huu Binh Ta , Ferdinando Fioretto

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) uniquely support any-order generation, with confidence-based decoding currently serving as the de facto standard inference policy. To optimize for this, recent training schemes attempt to align…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Dueun Kim , Albert No

Masked (or absorbing) diffusion is actively explored as an alternative to autoregressive models for generative modeling of discrete data. However, existing work in this area has been hindered by unnecessarily complex model formulations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Jiaxin Shi , Kehang Han , Zhe Wang , Arnaud Doucet , Michalis K. Titsias

Mask-based Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) struggle to revise incorrect tokens: once a token is generated, it typically remains fixed. The key challenge is to identify potential errors in the inputs. In this paper, we propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zemin Huang , Yuhang Wang , Zhiyang Chen , Guo-Jun Qi

The recent surge of generative AI has been fueled by the generative power of diffusion probabilistic models and the scalable capabilities of large language models. Despite their potential, it remains elusive whether diffusion language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Jiasheng Ye , Zaixiang Zheng , Yu Bao , Lihua Qian , Quanquan Gu

While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made impressive strides, they predominantly employ a conventional autoregressive architecture as their backbone, leaving significant room to explore effective and efficient…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Lijiang Li , Zuwei Long , Yunhang Shen , Heting Gao , Haoyu Cao , Xing Sun , Caifeng Shan , Ran He , Chaoyou Fu

Masked diffusion models (MDM) exhibit superior generalization when learned using a Partial masking scheme (Prime). This approach converts tokens into sub-tokens and models the diffusion process at the sub-token level. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Chen-Hao Chao , Wei-Fang Sun , Junwei Quan , Chun-Yi Lee , Rahul G. Krishnan

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently gained traction as a viable generative framework for natural language. This can be attributed to its scalability and ease of training compared to other diffusion model paradigms for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Tejomay Kishor Padole , Suyash P Awate , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Diffusion models excel at capturing the natural design spaces of images, molecules, DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. However, rather than merely generating designs that are natural, we often aim to optimize downstream reward functions while…

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