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Discrete diffusion models generate sequences by iteratively denoising samples corrupted by categorical noise, offering an appealing alternative to autoregressive decoding for structured and symbolic generation. However, standard training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Huu Binh Ta , Michael Cardei , Alvaro Velasquez , Ferdinando Fioretto

Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Xin Dai , Pengcheng Huang , Zhenghao Liu , Shuo Wang , Yukun Yan , Chaojun Xiao , Yu Gu , Ge Yu , Maosong Sun

Diffusion models (DMs) are a powerful generative framework that have attracted significant attention in recent years. However, the high computational cost of training DMs limits their practical applications. In this paper, we start with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Tianshuo Xu , Peng Mi , Ruilin Wang , Yingcong Chen

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

Recent masked diffusion language models (MDLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have achieved performance comparable to autoregressive large language models. Unlike autoregressive models, which generate text sequentially, MDLMs generate text by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Georu Lee , Seungwon Jeong , Hoki Kim , Jinseong Park , Woojin Lee

There has been a longstanding belief that generation can facilitate a true understanding of visual data. In line with this, we revisit generatively pre-training visual representations in light of recent interest in denoising diffusion…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Chen Wei , Karttikeya Mangalam , Po-Yao Huang , Yanghao Li , Haoqi Fan , Hu Xu , Huiyu Wang , Cihang Xie , Alan Yuille , Christoph Feichtenhofer

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 models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for language modeling, yet the effective design of transformer architectures for MDMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sanghyun Lee , Chunsan Hong , Seungryong Kim , Jonghyun Lee , Jongho Park , Dongmin Park

Discrete diffusion models have recently shown great promise for modeling complex discrete data, with masked diffusion models (MDMs) offering a compelling trade-off between quality and generation speed. MDMs denoise by progressively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Tianyu Xie , Shuchen Xue , Zijin Feng , Tianyang Hu , Jiacheng Sun , Zhenguo Li , Cheng Zhang

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential in language modeling, offering various advantages over traditional autoregressive approaches. Their ability to generate and revise entire responses in parallel enables faster generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Michael Hersche , Samuel Moor-Smith , Thomas Hofmann , Abbas Rahimi

A major bottleneck of standard auto-regressive large language models is that their inference process is inherently sequential, resulting in very long and costly inference times. To circumvent this, practitioners proposed a class of language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sitan Chen , Kevin Cong , Jerry Li

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

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Moongyu Jeon , Sangwoo Shin , BumJun Kim , Kyelim Lee , Albert No

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

At the core of both successful generative and self-supervised representation learning models there is a reconstruction objective that incorporates some form of image corruption. Diffusion models implement this approach through a scheduled…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Philippe Hansen-Estruch , Sriram Vishwanath , Amy Zhang , Manan Tomar

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) offer a promising non-autoregressive alternative for large language modeling. Standard decoding methods for MDMs, such as confidence-based sampling, select tokens independently based on individual token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Daehoon Gwak , Minseo Jung , Junwoo Park , Minho Park , ChaeHun Park , Junha Hyung , Jaegul Choo

Recently proposed generative models for discrete data, such as Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs), exploit conditional independence approximations to reduce the computational cost of popular Auto-Regressive Models (ARMs), at the price of some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-18 Hugo Lavenant , Giacomo Zanella

Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have recently attracted increasing attention by showing impressive synthesis quality. DDMs are built on a diffusion process that pushes data to the noise distribution and the models learn to denoise. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Jaemoo Choi , Yesom Park , Myungjoo Kang

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) enable flexible decoding orders, yet existing samplers remain largely greedy, selecting locally certain tokens without accounting for their downstream effects. We show that this myopia can increase cumulative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Kaisen Yang , Jayden Teoh , Kaicheng Yang , Yitong Zhang , Alex Lamb

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) are powerful generative models that have achieved unparalleled success in a number of generative tasks. In this work, we aim to build inductive biases into the training and sampling of diffusion models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Thomas Jiralerspong , Berton Earnshaw , Jason Hartford , Yoshua Bengio , Luca Scimeca