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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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Shen Nie , Fengqi Zhu , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Qian Liu , Guangtao Zeng , Min Lin , Chongxuan Li

While Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are theoretically well-suited for iterative refinement due to their non-causal structure, they often fail to reliably revise incorrect tokens in practice. The key challenge lies in the model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Shuibai Zhang , Fred Zhangzhi Peng , Yiheng Zhang , Jin Pan , Grigorios G. Chrysos

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) enable parallel decoding by predicting all masked positions at each denoising step, yet existing training-free samplers usually decide which positions to commit at token-level granularity. We revisit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Heqiang Qi , Wei Huang , Mingyuan Bai , Xiangming Meng

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

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for faster inference via parallel token generation. We provide a rigorous foundation for this advantage by formalizing a model of parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haozhe Jiang , Nika Haghtalab , Lijie Chen

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…

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) offer the potential for parallel token generation, but most open-source MDLMs decode fewer than 5 tokens per model forward pass even with sophisticated sampling strategies, limiting their parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Shirui Chen , Jiantao Jiao , Lillian J. Ratliff , Banghua Zhu

The generation speed of LLMs are bottlenecked by autoregressive decoding, where tokens are predicted sequentially one by one. Alternatively, diffusion large language models (dLLMs) theoretically allow for parallel token generation, but in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Daniel Israel , Guy Van den Broeck , Aditya Grover

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) accelerate text generation by unmasking multiple tokens in parallel. However, parallel decoding introduces a distributional mismatch: it approximates the joint conditional using a fully factorized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Liran Ringel , Ameen Ali , Yaniv Romano

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a new paradigm in language modeling, offering flexible generation dynamics and enabling efficient parallel decoding. However, existing decoding strategies for pre-trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xueyu Zhou , Yangrong Hu , Jian Huang

Diffusion language models have emerged as a promising approach for text generation. One would naturally expect this method to be an efficient replacement for autoregressive models since multiple tokens can be sampled in parallel during each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Guhao Feng , Yihan Geng , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Liwei Wang , Di He

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

A possible explanation for the impressive performance of masked language model (MLM) pre-training is that such models have learned to represent the syntactic structures prevalent in classical NLP pipelines. In this paper, we propose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Koustuv Sinha , Robin Jia , Dieuwke Hupkes , Joelle Pineau , Adina Williams , Douwe Kiela

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

With the increasing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), parallel reasoning has emerged as a new inference paradigm that enhances reasoning robustness by concurrently exploring multiple lines of thought before converging on a final…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ziqi Wang , Boye Niu , Zipeng Gao , Zhi Zheng , Tong Xu , Linghui Meng , Zhongli Li , Jing Liu , Yilong Chen , Chen Zhu , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang , Enhong Chen

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

The recent Natural Language Processing techniques have been refreshing the state-of-the-art performance at an incredible speed. Training huge language models is therefore an imperative demand in both industry and academy. However, huge…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Zhengda Bian , Qifan Xu , Boxiang Wang , Yang You

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)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Jia-Nan Li , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Chongxuan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionised the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in practically every task in this field. However, the prevalent approach used in text generation,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Nicolo Micheletti , Samuel Belkadi , Lifeng Han , Goran Nenadic

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