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Related papers: How Efficient Are Diffusion Language Models? A Cri…

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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 large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities that benefits from online reinforcement learning (RL). These capabilities have primarily been demonstrated within the left-to-right autoregressive (AR)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Siyan Zhao , Devaansh Gupta , Qinqing Zheng , Aditya Grover

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as a compelling alternative to dominant autoregressive models, replacing strictly sequential token generation with iterative denoising and parallel generation dynamics. However, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jingyi Yang , Yuxian Jiang , Xuhao Hu , Shuang Cheng , Biqing Qi , Jing Shao

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) due to their ability to capture bidirectional context and the potential for parallel generation. Despite the advantages, dLLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Zijian Zhu , Fei Ren , Zhanhong Tan , Kaisheng Ma

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are emerging as a compelling alternative to the dominant autoregressive paradigm, offering inherent advantages in parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, for the tasks with strict…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Yihong Dong , Zhaoyu Ma , Xue Jiang , Zhiyuan Fan , Jiaru Qian , Yongmin Li , Jianha Xiao , Zhi Jin , Rongyu Cao , Binhua Li , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Ge Li

We study why continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) have lagged behind discrete diffusion approaches despite their appealing continuous generative dynamics. Under a controlled token--recovery study, we identify token rounding, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Junzhe Shen , Jieru Zhao , Ziwei He , Zhouhan Lin

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…

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction. However, practical dLLM decoding still suffers from high inference latency, which limits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Zhenbang Du , Kejing Xia , Xinrui Zhong , Yonggan Fu , Nicolai Oswald , Binfei Ji , Brucek Khailany , Pavlo Molchanov , Yingyan Lin

This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the use of diffusion models in natural language processing (NLP). Diffusion models are a class of mathematical models that aim to capture the diffusion of information or signals across a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Hao Zou , Zae Myung Kim , Dongyeop Kang

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

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language generation due to their potential for parallel decoding and global refinement of the entire sequence. To unlock this potential, DLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Xiang Xia , Wuyang Zhang , Jiazheng Liu , Cheng Yan , Yanyong Zhang

Unlike autoregressive language models, which terminate variable-length generation upon predicting an End-of-Sequence (EoS) token, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) operate over a fixed maximum-length context window for a predetermined number…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Vittorio Rossi , Giacomo Cirò , Davide Beltrame , Luca Gandolfi , Paul Röttger , Dirk Hovy

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as an alternative to autoregressive approaches, offering parallel sequence generation and flexible token orders. However, their inference remains slower than that of autoregressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Pengxiang Li , Yefan Zhou , Dilxat Muhtar , Lu Yin , Shilin Yan , Li Shen , Soroush Vosoughi , Shiwei Liu

Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Maximo Eduardo Rulli , Simone Petruzzi , Edoardo Michielon , Fabrizio Silvestri , Simone Scardapane , Alessio Devoto

The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) is currently defined by auto-regressive (AR) architectures, which generate text through a sequential ``brick-by-brick'' process. Despite their success, AR models are inherently constrained by a…

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, leveraging denoising-based generation to enable inherent parallelism. Even more and more open-sourced dLLM models emerge, yet…

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

While most autoregressive LLMs are constrained to one-by-one decoding, diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have attracted growing interest for their potential to dramatically accelerate inference through parallel decoding. Despite this promise, the…

Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as promising alternatives to Auto-Regressive (AR) models. While recent efforts have validated their pre-training potential and accelerated inference speeds, the post-training landscape for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Ying Zhu , Jiaxin Wan , Xiaoran Liu , Siyang He , Qiqi Wang , Xu Guo , Tianyi Liang , Zengfeng Huang , Ziwei He , Xipeng Qiu

Autoregressive (AR) models remain the standard for natural language generation but still suffer from high latency due to strictly sequential decoding. Recent diffusion-inspired approaches, such as LlaDA and Dream, mitigate this by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Qinglin Zhu , Yizhen Yao , Runcong Zhao , Yanzheng Xiang , Amrutha Saseendran , Chen Jin , Philip Teare , Bin Liang , Yulan He , Lin Gui