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Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive approaches, enabling parallel text generation with competitive performance. Despite these advantages, there is a critical instability in DLMs: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zihou Zhang , Zheyong Xie , Li Zhong , Haifeng Liu , Yao Hu , Shaosheng Cao

We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Edoardo Cetin , Tianyu Zhao , Yujin Tang

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models, yet their inference strategies remain limited to prefix-based prompting inherited from the autoregressive paradigm. In this paper,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Junhoo Lee , Seungyeon Kim , Nojun Kwak

Diffusion models (DMs) have established themselves as the state-of-the-art generative modeling approach in the visual domain and beyond. A crucial drawback of DMs is their slow sampling speed, relying on many sequential function evaluations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Amirmojtaba Sabour , Sanja Fidler , Karsten Kreis

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) promise fast parallel generation, yet open-source DLLMs still face a severe quality-speed trade-off: accelerating decoding by revealing multiple tokens often causes substantial quality degradation. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Fanqin Zeng , Feng Hong , Geng Yu , Huangjie Zheng , Xiaofeng Cao , Ya Zhang , Bo Han , Yanfeng Wang , Jiangchao Yao

Diffusion language models are a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for faster generation. Among discrete diffusion approaches, Masked diffusion currently dominates, largely driven by strong perplexity on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Jean-Marie Lemercier , Zhihan Yang , Justin Deschenaux , Jingyu Liu , John Thickstun , Ante Jukic

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…

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have emerged as powerful tools for generative modeling. However, their sequential computation requirements lead to significant inference-time bottlenecks. In this work, we utilize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hengyuan Hu , Aniket Das , Dorsa Sadigh , Nima Anari

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their reasoning ability through chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, LLM's autoregressive decoding may limit the ability to revisit and refine earlier tokens in a holistic manner, which can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Haoqiang Kang , Yizhe Zhang , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Nicklas Majamaki , Navdeep Jaitly , Yi-An Ma , Lianhui Qin

Recently, diffusion models have garnered significant interest in the field of text processing due to their many potential advantages compared to conventional autoregressive models. In this work, we propose Diffusion-of-Thought (DoT), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Jiacheng Ye , Shansan Gong , Liheng Chen , Lin Zheng , Jiahui Gao , Han Shi , Chuan Wu , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Wei Bi , Lingpeng Kong

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

Modern language models generate chain-of-thought traces by autoregressively sampling tokens from a finite vocabulary. While this discrete sampling has achieved remarkable success, conducting chain-of-thought with continuously-valued tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Halil Alperen Gozeten , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Xuechen Zhang , Hrayr Harutyunyan , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising approach for language modeling, yet they face a performance gap compared to autoregressive models (ARMs) and require more training iterations. In this work, we present the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Mahdi Karami , Ali Ghodsi

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) deliver strong likelihoods, but are inherently serial: they generate one token per forward pass, which limits throughput and inflates latency for long sequences. Diffusion Language Models (DLMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Amin Karimi Monsefi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Manuel Rafael Ciosici , Dominic Culver , Yizhe Zhang , Irina Belousova

Large language models have achieved remarkable success under the autoregressive paradigm, yet high-quality text generation need not be tied to a fixed left-to-right order. Existing alternatives still struggle to jointly achieve generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hongcan Guo , Qinyu Zhao , Yian Zhao , Shen Nie , Rui Zhu , Qiushan Guo , Feng Wang , Tao Yang , Hengshuang Zhao , Guoqiang Wei , Yan Zeng

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have strong theoretical efficiency but are limited by fixed-length decoding and incompatibility with key-value (KV) caches. Block diffusion mitigates these issues, yet still enforces a fixed block size and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yangzhou Liu , Yue Cao , Hao Li , Gen Luo , Zhe Chen , Weiyun Wang , Xiaobo Liang , Biqing Qi , Lijun Wu , Changyao Tian , Yanting Zhang , Yuqiang Li , Tong Lu , Yu Qiao , Jifeng Dai , Wenhai Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the substantial number of parameters in LLMs contributes to significant latency during model inference. This is particularly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Pengfei Wu , Jiahao Liu , Zhuocheng Gong , Qifan Wang , Jinpeng Li , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao

While diffusion has drawn considerable recent attention from the language modeling community, continuous diffusion has appeared less scalable than discrete approaches. To challenge this belief we revisit Plaid, a likelihood-based continuous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhihan Yang , Wei Guo , Shuibai Zhang , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Yongxin Chen , Arash Vahdat , Morteza Mardani , John Thickstun

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 competitive alternative to autoregressive models, offering unique advantages through bidirectional attention and parallel generation paradigms. However, the generation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yifeng Gao , Ziang Ji , Yuxuan Wang , Biqing Qi , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang