English
Related papers

Related papers: Auto-Regressive Masked Diffusion Models

200 papers

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are widely regarded as relying on autoregressive models (ARMs). We challenge this notion by introducing LLaDA, a diffusion model trained from scratch under the pre-training and supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Shen Nie , Fengqi Zhu , Zebin You , Xiaolu Zhang , Jingyang Ou , Jun Hu , Jun Zhou , Yankai Lin , Ji-Rong Wen , Chongxuan Li

Diffusion language models hold the promise of fast parallel generation, while autoregressive (AR) models typically excel in quality due to their causal structure aligning naturally with language modeling. This raises a fundamental question:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jingyu Liu , Xin Dong , Zhifan Ye , Rishabh Mehta , Yonggan Fu , Vartika Singh , Jan Kautz , Ce Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov

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)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Kaiwen Zheng , Yongxin Chen , Hanzi Mao , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Qinsheng Zhang

As the deep learning revolution marches on, masked modeling has emerged as a distinctive approach that involves predicting parts of the original data that are proportionally masked during training, and has demonstrated exceptional…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-25 Qinrong Cai , Yu Guan , Zhibo Chen , Dong Liang , Qiuyun Fan , Qiegen Liu

Autoregressive (AR) models have long dominated the landscape of large language models, driving progress across a wide range of tasks. Recently, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative, though their advantages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mihir Prabhudesai , Mengning Wu , Amir Zadeh , Katerina Fragkiadaki , Deepak Pathak

The main advantages of diffusion language models over autoregressive (AR) models lie in their ability to support parallel generation and bidirectional attention, enabling a more controllable generation process. In recent years, open-source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Haocheng Sun , Cynthia Xin Wen , Edward Hong Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Houxing Ren , Mingjie Zhan , Zimu Lu , Ke Wang , Yunqiao Yang , Haotian Hou , Junting Pan , Hongsheng Li

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the long-dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm, offering a parallelable decoding process that could yield greater efficiency. Yet, in practice, current open-source…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Han Peng , Peiyu Liu , Zican Dong , Daixuan Cheng , Junyi Li , Yiru Tang , Shuo Wang , Wayne Xin Zhao

A major bottleneck of standard auto-regressive large language models is that their inference process is inherently sequential, resulting in very long and costly inference times. To circumvent this, practitioners proposed a class of language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sitan Chen , Kevin Cong , Jerry Li

Recent masked diffusion language models (MDLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have achieved performance comparable to autoregressive large language models. Unlike autoregressive models, which generate text sequentially, MDLMs generate text by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Georu Lee , Seungwon Jeong , Hoki Kim , Jinseong Park , Woojin Lee

The bifurcation of generative modeling into autoregressive approaches for discrete data (text) and diffusion approaches for continuous data (images) hinders the development of truly unified multimodal systems. While Masked Language Models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yuanfeng Xu , Yuhao Chen , Liang Lin , Guangrun Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Maximo Eduardo Rulli , Simone Petruzzi , Edoardo Michielon , Fabrizio Silvestri , Simone Scardapane , Alessio Devoto

Masked diffusion models (MDM) are powerful generative models for discrete data that generate samples by progressively unmasking tokens in a sequence. Each token can take one of two states: masked or unmasked. We observe that token sequences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Chen-Hao Chao , Wei-Fang Sun , Hanwen Liang , Chun-Yi Lee , Rahul G. Krishnan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Jaeyeon Kim , Kulin Shah , Vasilis Kontonis , Sham Kakade , Sitan Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Mengni Jia , Mengyu Zhou , Yihao Liu , Xiaoxi Jiang , Guanjun Jiang

Masked auto-regressive diffusion models (MAR) benefit from the expressive modeling ability of diffusion models and the flexibility of masked auto-regressive ordering. However, vanilla MAR suffers from slow inference due to its hierarchical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Yuxuan Gu , Weimin Bai , Yifei Wang , Weijian Luo , He Sun

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

Current autoregressive language models (ARMs) achieve high accuracy but require long token sequences, making them costly. Discrete diffusion language models (DDLMs) enable parallel and flexible generation within a fixed number of steps and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lina Berrayana , Ahmed Heakl , Muhammad Abdullah Sohail , Thomas Hofmann , Salman Khan , Wei Chen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Longxuan Yu , Yu Fu , Shaorong Zhang , Hui Liu , Mukund Varma T , Greg Ver Steeg , Yue Dong

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are often advertised as enabling parallel token generation, yet practical fast DLMs frequently converge to left-to-right, autoregressive (AR)-like decoding dynamics. In contrast, genuinely non-AR generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Pengxiang Li , Dilxat Muhtar , Tianlong Chen , Lu Yin , Shiwei Liu