Related papers: A Theoretical Analysis of Why Masked Diffusion Mod…
The reversal curse describes a failure of autoregressive language models to retrieve a fact in reverse order (e.g., training on ``$A > B$'' but failing on ``$B < A$''). Recent work shows that objectives with bidirectional supervision (e.g.,…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…
Post-training pretrained autoregressive models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) has emerged as a cost-effective way to overcome the limitations of sequential generation. Yet it remains unclear whether post-trained MDMs acquire…
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…
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…
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…
Auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) show impressive capacities to solve many complex reasoning tasks while struggling with some simple logical reasoning tasks such as inverse search: when trained on '$A \to B$' (e.g., 'Tom is the…
Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for generative modeling over discrete domains. It is known that MDMs effectively train to decode tokens in a random order, and that this ordering has…
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…
The "reversal curse" refers to the phenomenon where large language models (LLMs) exhibit predominantly unidirectional behavior when processing logically bidirectional relationships. Prior work attributed this to autoregressive training --…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have a surprising failure: when trained on "A has a feature B", they do not generalize to "B is a feature of A", which is termed the Reversal Curse. Even when training with trillions of tokens this issue still…
Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many complex tasks, yet they can still fail in very simple logical reasoning such as the "reversal curse" -- when trained on forward knowledge data of the form…
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…
While large language models (LLMs) showcase unprecedented capabilities, they also exhibit certain inherent limitations when facing seemingly trivial tasks. A prime example is the recently debated "reversal curse", which surfaces when…
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…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…
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)…
We introduce the concept of the self-referencing causal cycle (abbreviated RECALL) - a mechanism that enables large language models (LLMs) to bypass the limitations of unidirectional causality, which underlies a phenomenon known as the…
Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation. In…