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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

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

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have inspired new paradigms for document reranking. While this paradigm better exploits the reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, most existing LLM-based rerankers rely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qi Liu , Kun Ai , Jiaxin Mao , Yanzhao Zhang , Mingxin Li , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Fengbin Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) enable parallel token decoding, providing a promising alternative to the sequential nature of autoregressive generation. However, their iterative denoising process remains computationally expensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Younjoo Lee , Junghoo Lee , Seungkyun Dan , Jaiyoung Park , Jung Ho Ahn

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

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

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…

Recently, Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) have offered high throughput and effective sequential reasoning, making them a competitive alternative to autoregressive LLMs (ALLMs). However, parallel decoding, which enables simultaneous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Qiguang Chen , Hanjing Li , Libo Qin , Dengyun Peng , Jinhao Liu , Jiangyi Wang , Chengyue Wu , Xie Chen , Yantao Du , Wanxiang Che

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) approaches, enabling parallel token generation beyond a rigid left-to-right order. Despite growing empirical success, the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yunxiao Zhao , Changxiao Cai

In this work, we provide a systematic survey of Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) and Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Language Models (dMLLMs). Unlike autoregressive (AR) models, dLLMs and dMLLMs adopt a multi-token, parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Runpeng Yu , Qi Li , Xinchao Wang

Diffusion language models promise parallel generation, yet still lag behind autoregressive (AR) models in quality. We stem this gap to a failure of introspective consistency: AR models agree with their own generations, while DLMs often do…

We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Shiyu Wang , Haolin Chen , Liangwei Yang , Jielin Qiu , Rithesh Murthy , Ming Zhu , Zixiang Chen , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Shelby Heinecke , Huan Wang

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

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

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation and bidirectional context, yet they underperform autoregressive (AR) models in both likelihood modeling and generated text quality. We identify that this performance gap arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) provide a fast and flexible alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) via iterative denoising with parallel updates. However, their evaluation is challenging: existing metrics conflate denoiser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Luhan Tang , Longxuan Yu , Shaorong Zhang , Greg Ver Steeg

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking"…

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

Autoregressive decoding in large language models (LLMs) requires $\mathcal{O}(n)$ sequential steps for $n$ tokens, fundamentally limiting inference throughput. Recent diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) enable parallel token generation through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Wenrui Bao , Zhiben Chen , Dan Xu , Yuzhang Shang

Part of the success of diffusion models stems from their ability to perform iterative refinement, i.e., repeatedly correcting outputs during generation. However, modern masked discrete diffusion lacks this capability: when a token is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guanghan Wang , Yair Schiff , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Volodymyr Kuleshov