Related papers: Parallelism and Generation Order in Masked Diffusi…

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) significantly accelerate inference by trading off sequential determinism. However, the theoretical mechanisms governing generation order and the risks inherent in parallelization remain under-explored. In this…

Autoregressive (AR) language models enforce a fixed left-to-right generation order, creating a fundamental limitation when the required output structure conflicts with natural reasoning (e.g., producing answers before explanations due to…

Masked discrete diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising new approach to generative modelling, offering the ability for parallel token generation and therefore greater efficiency than autoregressive counterparts. However, achieving an…

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 language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token…

Autoregressive (AR) generation is the standard decoding paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), but its token-by-token nature limits parallelism at inference time. Diffusion Language Models (DLLMs) offer parallel decoding by recovering…

In discrete generative modeling, two dominant paradigms demonstrate divergent capabilities: Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLM) excel at semantic understanding and zero-shot generalization, whereas Uniform-noise Diffusion Language…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including document processing and code generation. Autoregressive Language Models (ARMs), which generate…

Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a…

Autoregressive language models are the currently dominant paradigm for text generation, but they have some fundamental limitations that cannot be remedied by scale-for example inherently sequential and unidirectional generation. While…

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…

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,…

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have shown promising performance across various reasoning tasks, establishing themselves as an alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). Unlike autoregressive LLMs that…

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer order-agnostic generation that can explore many possible decoding trajectories. However, current decoding methods commit to a single trajectory, limiting exploration in trajectory space. We introduce…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm. By generating tokens in parallel through an iterative denoising process, DLMs possess inherent…

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.…