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While large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse tasks, recent studies showcase that causal LLMs suffer from the "reversal curse". It is a typical example that the model knows "A's father is B", but is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Qingyan Guo , Rui Wang , Junliang Guo , Xu Tan , Jiang Bian , Yujiu Yang

Large language models (LLMs) are often used in environments where facts evolve, yet factual knowledge updates via fine-tuning on unstructured text often suffer from 1) reliance on compute-heavy paraphrasing augmentation and 2) the reversal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xu Pan , Ely Hahami , Jingxuan Fan , Ziqian Xie , Haim Sompolinsky

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 (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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Xin Dai , Pengcheng Huang , Zhenghao Liu , Shuo Wang , Yukun Yan , Chaojun Xiao , Yu Gu , Ge Yu , Maosong Sun

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) have been shown to memorize and occasionally reproduce training data verbatim, raising concerns about privacy and copyright liability. Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xiaoyu Luo , Wenrui Yu , Qiongxiu Li , Johannes Bjerva

Today's best language models still struggle with hallucinations: factually incorrect generations, which impede their ability to reliably retrieve information seen during training. The reversal curse, where models cannot recall information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ouail Kitouni , Niklas Nolte , Diane Bouchacourt , Adina Williams , Mike Rabbat , Mark Ibrahim

In sequence-to-sequence Transformer ASR, autoregressive (AR) models achieve strong accuracy but suffer from slow decoding, while non-autoregressive (NAR) models enable parallel decoding at the cost of degraded performance. We propose a…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-26 Hao Yen , Pin-Jui Ku , Ante Jukić , Sabato Marco Siniscalchi

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have achieved notable progress in modeling discrete data, while their potential in molecular generation remains underexplored. In this work, we explore their potential and introduce the surprising result that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Hyunjin Seo , Taewon Kim , Sihyun Yu , SungSoo Ahn

Humans are accustomed to reading and writing in a forward manner, and this natural bias extends to text understanding in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). This paper investigates whether LLMs, like humans, struggle with reverse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Sicheng Yu , Yuanchen Xu , Cunxiao Du , Yanying Zhou , Minghui Qiu , Qianru Sun , Hao Zhang , Jiawei Wu

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for language modeling, yet the effective design of transformer architectures for MDMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sanghyun Lee , Chunsan Hong , Seungryong Kim , Jonghyun Lee , Jongho Park , Dongmin Park

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

The term "Reversal Curse" refers to the scenario where auto-regressive decoder large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A," assuming that B and A are distinct and can be uniquely identified from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Da Wu , Jingye Yang , Kai Wang

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation while achieving competitive performance. Despite these advantages, MDMs face a fundamental limitation: once…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yair Schiff , Omer Belhasin , Roy Uziel , Guanghan Wang , Marianne Arriola , Gilad Turok , Michael Elad , Volodymyr Kuleshov

The reversal curse--a language model's inability to infer an unseen fact "B is A" from a learned fact "A is B"--is widely considered a fundamental limitation. We show that this is not an inherent failure but an artifact of how models encode…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Dong-Kyum Kim , Minsung Kim , Jea Kwon , Nakyeong Yang , Meeyoung Cha

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential in language modeling, offering various advantages over traditional autoregressive approaches. Their ability to generate and revise entire responses in parallel enables faster generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Michael Hersche , Samuel Moor-Smith , Thomas Hofmann , Abbas Rahimi

Attention mechanisms that confer selective focus on a strict subset of input elements are nearly ubiquitous in language models today. We posit there to be downside to the use of attention: most input information is lost. In support of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Benjamin L. Badger

Transformer-based models have been widely adopted for sentiment analysis tasks due to their exceptional ability to capture contextual information. However, these methods often exhibit suboptimal accuracy in certain scenarios. By analyzing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Yawei Liu

Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs exhibit a basic generalization failure known as the Reversal Curse, where they struggle to learn reversible factual associations. Understanding why this occurs could help identify weaknesses in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Boshi Wang , Huan Sun

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yuxiang Wang , Yu Xiang , Baojian Zhou , Qifang Zhao , Keyue Jiang , Yanghua Xiao , Xiaoxiao Xu

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