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Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation and bidirectional context, yet they underperform autoregressive (AR) models in both likelihood modeling and generated text quality. We identify that this performance gap arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

Autoregressive (AR) language models and Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) constitute the two principal paradigms of large language models. However, both paradigms suffer from insufficient reasoning capabilities. Human reasoning inherently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Kairong Han , Nuanqiao Shan , Ziyu Zhao , Zijing Hu , Xinpeng Dong , Junjian Ye , Lujia Pan , Fei Wu , Kun Kuang

Non-autoregressive (NAR) text generation has attracted much attention in the field of natural language processing, which greatly reduces the inference latency but has to sacrifice the generation accuracy. Recently, diffusion models, a class…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Yifan Li , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Diffusion language models hold the promise of fast parallel generation, while autoregressive (AR) models typically excel in quality due to their causal structure aligning naturally with language modeling. This raises a fundamental question:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jingyu Liu , Xin Dong , Zhifan Ye , Rishabh Mehta , Yonggan Fu , Vartika Singh , Jan Kautz , Ce Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov

Autoregressive large language models achieve strong results on many benchmarks, but decoding remains fundamentally latency-limited by sequential dependence on previously generated tokens. Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yihao Liang , Ze Wang , Hao Chen , Ximeng Sun , Jialian Wu , Xiaodong Yu , Jiang Liu , Emad Barsoum , Zicheng Liu , Niraj K. Jha

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often rely on autoregressive (AR) Transformer decoder architectures, which limit efficient inference parallelization due to their sequential nature. To this end, non-autoregressive (NAR) approaches…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-13 Tianzi Wang , Xurong Xie , Zengrui Jin , Mengzhe Geng , Jiajun Deng , Zhaoqing Li , Shoukang Hu , Shujie Hu , Guinan Li , Mingyu Cui , Helen Meng , Xunying Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Mahdi Karami , Ali Ghodsi

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer attractive advantages over Auto-Regressive (AR) models, such as full-attention parallel decoding and flexible generation. However, standard DLM training uses a static, single-step masked prediction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zehua Pei , Hui-Ling Zhen , Weizhe Lin , Sinno Jialin Pan , Yunhe Wang , Mingxuan Yuan , Bei Yu

We study why continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) have lagged behind discrete diffusion approaches despite their appealing continuous generative dynamics. Under a controlled token--recovery study, we identify token rounding, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Junzhe Shen , Jieru Zhao , Ziwei He , Zhouhan Lin

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…

Denoising language models (DLMs) have been proposed as a powerful alternative to traditional language models (LMs) for automatic speech recognition (ASR), motivated by their ability to use bidirectional context and adapt to a specific ASR…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Dorian Koch , Albert Zeyer , Nick Rossenbach , Ralf Schlüter , Hermann Ney

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently demonstrated capabilities that complement standard autoregressive (AR) models, particularly in non-sequential generation and bidirectional editing. Although recent work has shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Fred Zhangzhi Peng , Alexis Fox , Anru R. Zhang , Alexander Tong

Most multi-agent systems rely exclusively on autoregressive language models (ARMs) that are based on sequential generation. Although effective for fluent text, ARMs limit global reasoning and plan revision. On the other hand, Discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Lina Berrayana , Ahmed Heakl , Abdullah Sohail , Thomas Hofmann , Salman Khan , Wei Chen

Diffusion language models offer parallel token generation and inherent bidirectionality, promising more efficient and powerful sequence modeling compared to autoregressive approaches. However, state-of-the-art diffusion models (e.g., Dream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Zhanqiu Hu , Jian Meng , Yash Akhauri , Mohamed S. Abdelfattah , Jae-sun Seo , Zhiru Zhang , Udit Gupta

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) decoding with appealing efficiency and modeling properties, yet their implications for agentic multi-step decision making remain underexplored. We…

Efficiency, as a critical practical challenge for LLM-driven agentic and reasoning systems, is increasingly constrained by the inherent latency of autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative decoding mitigates this cost through a draft-verify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Zicong Cheng , Guo-Wei Yang , Jia Li , Zhijie Deng , Meng-Hao Guo , Shi-Min Hu

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…

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)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Jia-Nan Li , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Chongxuan Li

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) promise fast parallel generation, yet open-source DLLMs still face a severe quality-speed trade-off: accelerating decoding by revealing multiple tokens often causes substantial quality degradation. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Fanqin Zeng , Feng Hong , Geng Yu , Huangjie Zheng , Xiaofeng Cao , Ya Zhang , Bo Han , Yanfeng Wang , Jiangchao Yao

Continuous visual autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated promising performance in image generation. However, the heavy autoregressive inference burden imposes significant overhead. In Large Language Models (LLMs), speculative decoding…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zili Wang , Robert Zhang , Kun Ding , Qi Yang , Fei Li , Shiming Xiang