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Related papers: Optimal Inference Schedules for Masked Diffusion M…

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Any order generation of discrete data using masked diffusion models (MDMs) offers a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive models, especially in domains that lack a natural causal ordering of data. However, current popular…

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

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for modern generative modeling, demonstrating strong potential for large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional autoregressive (AR) models that generate tokens sequentially,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Gen Li , Changxiao Cai

Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) offer a flexible framework for sampling from high dimensional data distributions. DDMs generate a path of probability distributions interpolating between a reference Gaussian distribution and a data…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-12 Christopher Williams , Andrew Campbell , Arnaud Doucet , Saifuddin Syed

Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology. Existing convergence theory, however, exhibits fundamental limitations. KL-based analyses diverge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Kelvin Kan , Xingjian Li , Benjamin J. Zhang , Tuhin Sahai , Stanley Osher , Markos A. Katsoulakis

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising approach for generative modeling in discrete spaces. By generating sequences in any order and allowing for parallel decoding, they enable fast inference and strong performance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jaeyeon Kim , Jonathan Geuter , David Alvarez-Melis , Sham Kakade , Sitan Chen

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

General unsupervised learning is a long-standing conceptual problem in machine learning. Supervised learning is successful because it can be solved by the minimization of the training error cost function. Unsupervised learning is not as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-12-04 Ilya Sutskever , Rafal Jozefowicz , Karol Gregor , Danilo Rezende , Tim Lillicrap , Oriol Vinyals

In autoregressive language models, each token is sampled by conditioning on all the past tokens; the overall string has thus been sampled from the correct underlying joint distribution represented by the model. In contrast, masked diffusion…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parikshit Bansal , Sujay Sanghavi

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive generation, offering parallel generation and improved global coherence. During inference, DLMs generate text by iteratively denoising…

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

We present a systematic theoretical framework that interprets masked diffusion models (MDMs) as solutions to energy minimization problems in discrete optimal transport. Specifically, we prove that three distinct energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Sitong Chen , Shen Nie , Jiacheng Sun , Zijin Feng , Zhenguo Li , Ji-Rong Wen , Chongxuan Li

This tutorial provides an in-depth guide on inference-time guidance and alignment methods for optimizing downstream reward functions in diffusion models. While diffusion models are renowned for their generative modeling capabilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Chenyu Wang , Xiner Li , Aviv Regev , Sergey Levine , Tommaso Biancalani

Recent masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown competitive performance compared to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. While most literature has focused on performance enhancing sampling procedures, efficient sampling from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Heli Ben-Hamu , Itai Gat , Daniel Severo , Niklas Nolte , Brian Karrer

Masked Discrete Diffusion Models (MDMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks, including image understanding, generation, and editing. However, their inference speed remains suboptimal due to the need to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Shufan Li , Jiuxiang Gu , Kangning Liu , Zhe Lin , Zijun Wei , Aditya Grover , Jason Kuen

Diffusion LLMs have emerged as a promising alternative to conventional autoregressive LLMs, offering significant potential for improved runtime efficiency. However, existing diffusion models lack the ability to provably enforce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Tarun Suresh , Debangshu Banerjee , Shubham Ugare , Sasa Misailovic , Gagandeep Singh

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation while achieving competitive performance. Despite these advantages, MDMs face a fundamental limitation: once…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yair Schiff , Omer Belhasin , Roy Uziel , Guanghan Wang , Marianne Arriola , Gilad Turok , Michael Elad , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) significantly accelerate inference by trading off sequential determinism. However, the theoretical mechanisms governing generation order and the risks inherent in parallelization remain under-explored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Shaorong Zhang , Longxuan Yu , Rob Brekelmans , Luhan Tang , Salman Asif , Greg Ver Steeg

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a new paradigm in language modeling, offering flexible generation dynamics and enabling efficient parallel decoding. However, existing decoding strategies for pre-trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xueyu Zhou , Yangrong Hu , Jian Huang

Sampling algorithms play an important role in controlling the quality and runtime of diffusion model inference. In recent years, a number of works~\cite{chen2023sampling,chen2023ode,benton2023error,lee2022convergence} have proposed schemes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shivam Gupta , Linda Cai , Sitan Chen