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Related papers: Scaling Beyond Masked Diffusion Language Models

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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…

Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology. Existing convergence theory, however, exhibits fundamental limitations. KL-based analyses diverge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Kelvin Kan , Xingjian Li , Benjamin J. Zhang , Tuhin Sahai , Stanley Osher , Markos A. Katsoulakis

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Jiacheng Ye , Jiahui Gao , Shansan Gong , Lin Zheng , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Lingpeng Kong

Diffusion language models promise parallel generation, yet still lag behind autoregressive (AR) models in quality. We stem this gap to a failure of introspective consistency: AR models agree with their own generations, while DLMs often do…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caio Vicentino

Despite recent advancements of large language models (LLMs), optimally predicting the model size for LLM pretraining or allocating optimal resources still remains a challenge. Several efforts have addressed the challenge by proposing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Md Arafat Hossain , Xingfu Wu , Valerie Taylor , Ali Jannesari

Autoregressive language models are the currently dominant paradigm for text generation, but they have some fundamental limitations that cannot be remedied by scale-for example inherently sequential and unidirectional generation. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Yuchen Li , Alexandre Kirchmeyer , Aashay Mehta , Yilong Qin , Boris Dadachev , Kishore Papineni , Sanjiv Kumar , Andrej Risteski

Diffusion-based language models are emerging as a promising alternative to autoregressive LMs: they approach the competence of autoregressive LMs while offering nuanced controllability at inference time. While autoregressive LMs have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Xiaochuang Han , Sachin Kumar , Yulia Tsvetkov , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Masked diffusion models (MDM) exhibit superior generalization when learned using a Partial masking scheme (Prime). This approach converts tokens into sub-tokens and models the diffusion process at the sub-token level. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Chen-Hao Chao , Wei-Fang Sun , Junwei Quan , Chun-Yi Lee , Rahul G. Krishnan

In generative models, two paradigms have gained attraction in various applications: next-set prediction-based Masked Generative Models and next-noise prediction-based Non-Autoregressive Models, e.g., Diffusion Models. In this work, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Vincent Tao Hu , Björn Ommer

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of models and a promising route to fast language generation, but practical implementations typically rely on factored reverse transitions ignoring cross-token dependencies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Dario Shariatian , Alain Durmus , Umut Simsekli , Stefano Peluchetti

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive generation, offering parallel generation and improved global coherence. During inference, DLMs generate text by iteratively denoising…

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

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

Recently, diffusion models have excelled in image generation tasks and have also been applied to neural language processing (NLP) for controllable text generation. However, the application of diffusion models in a cross-lingual setting is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Linyao Chen , Aosong Feng , Boming Yang , Zihui Li

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs for text generation, with the potential to decode multiple tokens in a single iteration. However, none of the existing open-source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Xu Wang , Chenkai Xu , Yijie Jin , Jiachun Jin , Hao Zhang , Zhijie Deng

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted method to accelerate large language model inference without sacrificing the quality of the model outputs. While this technique has facilitated notable speed improvements by enabling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Jacob K Christopher , Brian R Bartoldson , Tal Ben-Nun , Michael Cardei , Bhavya Kailkhura , Ferdinando Fioretto

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) tasks, yet most NL2SQL systems continue to rely on the autoregressive (AR) paradigm. The highly structured nature of SQL makes…

Databases · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Peixian Ma , Xialie Zhuang , Jiantao Tan , Changlun Li , Ruirui Chen , Chengwei Qin

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiyeon Kim , Sungik Choi , Yongrae Jo , Moontae Lee , Minjoon Seo

We introduce Transfusion, a recipe for training a multi-modal model over discrete and continuous data. Transfusion combines the language modeling loss function (next token prediction) with diffusion to train a single transformer over…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Chunting Zhou , Lili Yu , Arun Babu , Kushal Tirumala , Michihiro Yasunaga , Leonid Shamis , Jacob Kahn , Xuezhe Ma , Luke Zettlemoyer , Omer Levy