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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

One of the most striking findings in modern research on large language models (LLMs) is that scaling up compute during training leads to better results. However, less attention has been given to the benefits of scaling compute during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Sean Welleck , Amanda Bertsch , Matthew Finlayson , Hailey Schoelkopf , Alex Xie , Graham Neubig , Ilia Kulikov , Zaid Harchaoui

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) as language models generate by iteratively unmasking tokens, yet their performance crucially depends on the inference time order of unmasking. Prevailing heuristics, such as confidence based sampling, are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sanghyun Lee , Seungryong Kim , Jongho Park , Dongmin Park

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yangyi Shen , Tianjian Feng , Jiaqi Han , Wen Wang , Tianlang Chen , Chunhua Shen , Jure Leskovec , Stefano Ermon

Large Language Diffusion Models (LLDMs) benefit from a flexible decoding mechanism that enables parallelized inference and controllable generations over autoregressive models. Yet such flexibility introduces a critical challenge: inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Yichuan Mo , Quan Chen , Mingjie Li , Zeming Wei , Yisen Wang

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-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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xiangzhong Luo , Yilin An , Zhicheng Yu , Weichen Liu , Xu Yang

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

Modern language models have historically relied on two dominant design choices: subword tokenization and autoregressive (AR) ordering. These design decisions bake in priors that dictate a model's learning. Recently, two alternative…

Part of the success of diffusion models stems from their ability to perform iterative refinement, i.e., repeatedly correcting outputs during generation. However, modern masked discrete diffusion lacks this capability: when a token is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guanghan Wang , Yair Schiff , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Volodymyr Kuleshov

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,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Moongyu Jeon , Sangwoo Shin , BumJun Kim , Kyelim Lee , Albert No

While most autoregressive LLMs are constrained to one-by-one decoding, diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have attracted growing interest for their potential to dramatically accelerate inference through parallel decoding. Despite this promise, the…

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 Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in language modeling, offering the advantages of parallel decoding and bidirectional context processing within a simple yet effective framework.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jaehoon Yoo , Wonjung Kim , Chanhyuk Lee , Seunghoon Hong

Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated significant improvements in accuracy by employing detailed and comprehensive reasoning processes. However, generating these lengthy reasoning sequences is computationally expensive and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Yijiong Yu

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently drawn considerable attention within the research community as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, offering parallel token prediction and lower inference latency. Yet,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Zigeng Chen , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Ruonan Yu , Xinchao Wang

The introduction of the new multi-user linearly-separable distributed computing framework, has recently revealed how a parallel treatment of users can yield large parallelization gains with relatively low computation and communication…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Amir Masoud Jafarpisheh , Ali Khalesi , Petros Elia

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising approach for generative modeling in discrete spaces. By generating sequences in any order and allowing for parallel decoding, they enable fast inference and strong performance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jaeyeon Kim , Jonathan Geuter , David Alvarez-Melis , Sham Kakade , Sitan Chen

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chenxiao Yang , Cai Zhou , David Wipf , Zhiyuan Li

The vast applications of deep generative models are anchored in three core capabilities -- generating new instances, reconstructing inputs, and learning compact representations -- across various data types, such as discrete text/protein…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Guangyi Liu , Yu Wang , Zeyu Feng , Qiyu Wu , Liping Tang , Yuan Gao , Zhen Li , Shuguang Cui , Julian McAuley , Zichao Yang , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu