Related papers: Thinking Out of Order: When Output Order Stops Ref…

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) promise parallel token generation and arbitrary-order decoding, yet it remains unclear to what extent current models truly realize these capabilities. We characterize MDLM behavior along two…

Autoregressive (AR) language models and Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) constitute the two principal paradigms of large language models. However, both paradigms suffer from insufficient reasoning capabilities. Human reasoning inherently…

Unlike autoregressive models, which generate tokens sequentially and benefit from reasoning-before-answering strategies such as Chain-of-Thought, Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) refine all sequence positions simultaneously, raising…

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…

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution space that strictly supersets the fixed…

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…

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements, with the test-time scaling law consistently enhancing the reasoning capabilities. Through systematic evaluation and exploration of a diverse spectrum of…

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, despite their impressive capabilities, struggle with complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We introduce discrete diffusion models as a novel solution to these challenges. Through the lens of subgoal…

Most multi-agent systems rely exclusively on autoregressive language models (ARMs) that are based on sequential generation. Although effective for fluent text, ARMs limit global reasoning and plan revision. On the other hand, Discrete…

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…

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 large language models (dLLMs) generate text via iterative denoising but consistently underperform on multi-step reasoning. We hypothesize this gap stems from a coordination problem: AR models build coherence token-by-token, while…

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…

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) uniquely support any-order generation, with confidence-based decoding currently serving as the de facto standard inference policy. To optimize for this, recent training schemes attempt to align…

The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) is currently defined by auto-regressive (AR) architectures, which generate text through a sequential ``brick-by-brick'' process. Despite their success, AR models are inherently constrained by a…

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…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress, yet their capacity for logical ``slow-thinking'' reasoning persists as a critical research frontier. Current inference scaling paradigms suffer from two…

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for modern generative modeling, demonstrating strong potential for large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional autoregressive (AR) models that generate tokens sequentially,…