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Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs), but they suffer from inherently much higher training variance. High variance leads to noisier gradient estimates and unstable optimization, so even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Mengni Jia , Mengyu Zhou , Yihao Liu , Xiaoxi Jiang , Guanjun Jiang

We propose an efficient approach to train large diffusion models with masked transformers. While masked transformers have been extensively explored for representation learning, their application to generative learning is less explored in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Hongkai Zheng , Weili Nie , Arash Vahdat , Anima Anandkumar

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

We present Masked Frequency Modeling (MFM), a unified frequency-domain-based approach for self-supervised pre-training of visual models. Instead of randomly inserting mask tokens to the input embeddings in the spatial domain, in this paper,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Jiahao Xie , Wei Li , Xiaohang Zhan , Ziwei Liu , Yew Soon Ong , Chen Change Loy

Generative modeling of discrete data underlies important applications spanning text-based agents like ChatGPT to the design of the very building blocks of life in protein sequences. However, application domains need to exert control over…

Diffusion language models have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models. Beyond next-token generation, they are more efficient and flexible by enabling parallel and any-order token generation. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chenxiao Yang , Cai Zhou , David Wipf , Zhiyuan Li

We introduce Autoregressive Diffusion Models (ARDMs), a model class encompassing and generalizing order-agnostic autoregressive models (Uria et al., 2014) and absorbing discrete diffusion (Austin et al., 2021), which we show are special…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Emiel Hoogeboom , Alexey A. Gritsenko , Jasmijn Bastings , Ben Poole , Rianne van den Berg , Tim Salimans

Diffusion models have shown incredible capabilities as generative models; indeed, they power the current state-of-the-art models on text-conditioned image generation such as Imagen and DALL-E 2. In this work we review, demystify, and unify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-26 Calvin Luo

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

Diffusion models that are based on iterative denoising have been recently proposed and leveraged in various generation tasks like image generation. Whereas, as a way inherently built for continuous data, existing diffusion models still have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Jiaao Chen , Aston Zhang , Mu Li , Alex Smola , Diyi Yang

With the development of deep learning, speech enhancement has been greatly optimized in terms of speech quality. Previous methods typically focus on the discriminative supervised learning or generative modeling, which tends to introduce…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-31 Nan Xu , Zhaolong Huang , Xiaonan Zhi

Diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results for image synthesis tasks as well as density estimation. Applied in the latent space of a powerful pretrained autoencoder (LDM), their immense computational requirements can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Jeremias Traub

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…

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive language models by enabling parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, their inference speed is significantly limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Satyam Goyal , Kushal Patel , Tanush Mittal , Arjun Laxman

Autoregressive language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggle with complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We introduce discrete diffusion models as a novel solution to these challenges. Through the lens of subgoal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Jiacheng Ye , Jiahui Gao , Shansan Gong , Lin Zheng , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Lingpeng Kong

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

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

Discrete diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models with strong performance across many domains. For efficiency, however, discrete diffusion typically parameterizes the generative (reverse) process with factorized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Grigory Bartosh , Teodora Pandeva , Sushrut Karmalkar , Javier Zazo

The predominant success of diffusion models in generative modeling has spurred significant interest in understanding their theoretical foundations. In this work, we propose a feature learning framework aimed at analyzing and comparing the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-04 Andi Han , Wei Huang , Yuan Cao , Difan Zou

Transformer-based diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance at generating high-quality samples. However, our theoretical understanding of the reasons for this success remains limited. For instance, existing models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hongkang Li , Hancheng Min , Rene Vidal