Related papers: Mechanism Shift During Post-training from Autoregr…
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…
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,…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a potential alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language generation, but generation quality depends critically on the generation order. Prior work either hard-codes an ordering (e.g., blockwise…
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,…
In recent years, masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative approach for generative modeling over discrete domains. Compared to autoregressive models (ARMs), MDMs trade off complexity at training time with…
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)…
Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for generative modeling over discrete domains. It is known that MDMs effectively train to decode tokens in a random order, and that this ordering has…
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…
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…
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…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…
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…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a popular research topic for generative modeling of discrete data, thanks to their superior performance over other discrete diffusion models, and are rivaling the auto-regressive models (ARMs)…
We present a controlled empirical comparison between autoregressive (AR) and masked diffusion (MDLM) language models. Both models are trained on identical data (50M tokens from TinyStories), identical compute budget (20,000 steps, batch…
Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…
In sequence-to-sequence Transformer ASR, autoregressive (AR) models achieve strong accuracy but suffer from slow decoding, while non-autoregressive (NAR) models enable parallel decoding at the cost of degraded performance. We propose a…
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…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) for text offer a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive language models. Parallel generation makes them efficient, but their computational capabilities and the limitations inherent in their…
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…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the…