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Autoregressive large language models achieve strong results on many benchmarks, but decoding remains fundamentally latency-limited by sequential dependence on previously generated tokens. Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yihao Liang , Ze Wang , Hao Chen , Ximeng Sun , Jialian Wu , Xiaodong Yu , Jiang Liu , Emad Barsoum , Zicheng Liu , Niraj K. Jha

Continuous diffusion has been the foundation of high-fidelity, controllable, and few-step generation of many data modalities such as images. However, in language modeling, prior continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) lag behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yuxin Chen , Chumeng Liang , Hangke Sui , Ruihan Guo , Chaoran Cheng , Jiaxuan You , Ge Liu

Discrete diffusion models have recently become competitive with autoregressive models for language modeling, even outperforming them on reasoning tasks requiring planning and global coherence, but they require more computation at inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Andre He , Sean Welleck , Daniel Fried

Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative models for image generation. However, sampling from diffusion models is usually time-consuming due to the inherent autoregressive nature of their sampling process. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Zhiwei Tang , Jiasheng Tang , Hao Luo , Fan Wang , Tsung-Hui Chang

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu

Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that enables parallel, non-autoregressive generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To…

Unlike autoregressive language models, which terminate variable-length generation upon predicting an End-of-Sequence (EoS) token, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) operate over a fixed maximum-length context window for a predetermined number…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Vittorio Rossi , Giacomo Cirò , Davide Beltrame , Luca Gandolfi , Paul Röttger , Dirk Hovy

Despite remarkable progress in autoregressive language models, alternative generative paradigms beyond left-to-right generation are still being actively explored. Discrete diffusion models, with the capacity for parallel generation, have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Minkai Xu , Tomas Geffner , Karsten Kreis , Weili Nie , Yilun Xu , Jure Leskovec , Stefano Ermon , Arash Vahdat

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have shown advantages in text generation, particularly due to their inherent ability for parallel decoding. However, constrained by the quality--speed trade-off, existing inference solutions adopt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Lizhuo Luo , Zhuoran Shi , Jiajun Luo , Zhi Wang , Shen Ren , Wenya Wang , Tianwei Zhang

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-based large language models (DLLMs) have shown promise for non-autoregressive text generation, but their deployment is constrained by large model sizes and heavy computational costs. Post-training quantization (PTQ), a widely used…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Chen Xu , Dawei Yang

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently demonstrated capabilities that complement standard autoregressive (AR) models, particularly in non-sequential generation and bidirectional editing. Although recent work has shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Fred Zhangzhi Peng , Alexis Fox , Anru R. Zhang , Alexander Tong

In arbitrary-order language models, it is an open question how to sample tokens in parallel from the correct joint distribution. With discrete diffusion models, the more tokens they generate in parallel, the less their predicted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Gabe Guo , Stefano Ermon

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as an alternative modeling paradigm to autoregressive (AR) language models, enabling parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling. Yet their security implications,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Shengfang Zhai , Xiaoyang Ji , Yuling Shi , Haoran Gao , Fanyu Meng , Yan Zeng , Yuejian Fang , Yinpeng Dong , Jiaheng Zhang

Latent diffusion models offer an attractive alternative to discrete diffusion for non-autoregressive text generation by operating on continuous text representations and denoising entire sequences in parallel. The major challenge in latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Viacheslav Meshchaninov , Alexander Shabalin , Egor Chimbulatov , Nikita Gushchin , Ilya Koziev , Alexander Korotin , Dmitry Vetrov

Diffusion-based decoding has recently emerged as an appealing alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, offering the potential to update multiple tokens in parallel and reduce latency. However, diffusion vision language models (dVLMs)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Lunbin Zeng , Jingfeng Yao , Bencheng Liao , Hongyuan Tao , Wenyu Liu , Xinggang Wang

Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a structural alternative to autoregressive generation: denoising can update tokens in arbitrary orders or in parallel rather than along a fixed left-to-right chain. In practice, fast DLM decoding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jeonseong Kim

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

Parallel test-time scaling (TTS) is a pivotal approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs), typically by sampling multiple token-based chains-of-thought in parallel and aggregating outcomes through voting or search. Recent advances…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Runyang You , Yongqi Li , Meng Liu , Wenjie Wang , Liqiang Nie , Wenjie Li

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