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Related papers: Scaling Beyond Masked Diffusion Language Models

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Diffusion models have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in modeling discrete categorical data. However, diffusion models that directly work on discrete data space fail to fully exploit the power of iterative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jaehyeong Jo , Sung Ju Hwang

We present a masked diffusion language modeling framework for data-efficient training for the BabyLM 2025 Challenge. Our approach applies diffusion training objectives to language modeling under strict data constraints, incorporating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Despoina Kosmopoulou , Efthymios Georgiou , Vaggelis Dorovatas , Georgios Paraskevopoulos , Alexandros Potamianos

Discrete diffusion models offer global context awareness and flexible parallel generation. However, uniform random noise schedulers in standard DLLM training overlook the highly non-uniform information density inherent in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Linrui Ma , Yufei Cui , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

Diffusion (Large) Language Models (dLLMs) now match the downstream performance of their autoregressive counterparts on many tasks, while holding the promise of being more efficient during inference. One critical design aspect of dLLMs is…

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm. By generating tokens in parallel through an iterative denoising process, DLMs possess inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Tianyi Li , Mingda Chen , Bowei Guo , Zhiqiang Shen

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

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text generative modeling, potentially addressing limitations of autoregressive (AR) models. However, current DLMs have been studied at a smaller scale compared to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Shansan Gong , Shivam Agarwal , Yizhe Zhang , Jiacheng Ye , Lin Zheng , Mukai Li , Chenxin An , Peilin Zhao , Wei Bi , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng , Lingpeng Kong

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Dawen Liang , Wenpin Tang , David Yao , Nathan Kallus

Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform…

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

Diffusion language models, as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive (AR) models, enable faster generation and richer conditioning on bidirectional context. However, they suffer from a key discrepancy between training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Haoyu He , Katrin Renz , Yong Cao , Andreas Geiger

While state-of-the-art language models achieve impressive results through next-token prediction, they have inherent limitations such as the inability to revise already generated tokens. This has prompted exploration of alternative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Dimitri von Rütte , Janis Fluri , Yuhui Ding , Antonio Orvieto , Bernhard Schölkopf , Thomas Hofmann

We show that a language model's ability to predict text is tightly linked to the breadth of its embedding space: models that spread their contextual representations more widely tend to achieve lower perplexity. Concretely, we find that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yanhong Li , Ming Li , Karen Livescu , Jiawei Zhou

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Georgios Batzolis , Mark Girolami , Luca Ambrogioni

In this work, we provide a systematic survey of Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) and Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Language Models (dMLLMs). Unlike autoregressive (AR) models, dLLMs and dMLLMs adopt a multi-token, parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Runpeng Yu , Qi Li , Xinchao Wang

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

Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models, benefiting from large scale pre-training and post-training, have begun to surpass BERT and T5-based models on general-purpose text embedding tasks such as document retrieval. However, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Siyue Zhang , Yilun Zhao , Liyuan Geng , Arman Cohan , Anh Tuan Luu , Chen Zhao

In recent years, language models have drastically grown in size, and the abilities of these models have been shown to improve with scale. The majority of recent scaling laws studies focused on high-compute high-parameter count settings,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Vijeta Deshpande , Dan Pechi , Shree Thatte , Vladislav Lialin , Anna Rumshisky

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a novel framework for language modeling. MDMs generate sentences by iteratively denoising masked sequences, filling in [MASK] tokens step by step. Although MDMs support any-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Chunsan Hong , Seonho An , Min-Soo Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Discrete Diffusion Language Models progressed rapidly as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) models, motivated by their parallel generation abilities. However, for tractability, discrete diffusion models sample from a factorized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Justin Deschenaux , Caglar Gulcehre