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The bifurcation of generative modeling into autoregressive approaches for discrete data (text) and diffusion approaches for continuous data (images) hinders the development of truly unified multimodal systems. While Masked Language Models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yuanfeng Xu , Yuhao Chen , Liang Lin , Guangrun Wang

Discrete diffusion models have recently become competitive with autoregressive models for language modeling, even outperforming them on reasoning tasks requiring planning and global coherence, but they require more computation at inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Andre He , Sean Welleck , Daniel Fried

Under strictly controlled pre-training settings, we observe a Crossover: when unique data is limited, diffusion language models (DLMs) consistently surpass autoregressive (AR) models by training for more epochs. The crossover shifts later…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Jinjie Ni , Qian Liu , Longxu Dou , Chao Du , Zili Wang , Hang Yan , Tianyu Pang , Michael Qizhe Shieh

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

Autoregressive (AR) language models generate text one token at a time, which limits their inference speed. Diffusion-based language models offer a promising alternative, as they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, we identify a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yeongbin Seo , Dongha Lee , Jaehyung Kim , Jinyoung Yeo

Autoregressive (AR) Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success across numerous tasks. However, the AR modeling paradigm presents certain limitations; for instance, contemporary autoregressive LLMs are trained to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Justin Deschenaux , Caglar Gulcehre

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 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

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for modern generative modeling, demonstrating strong potential for large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional autoregressive (AR) models that generate tokens sequentially,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Gen Li , Changxiao Cai

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for faster inference via parallel token generation. We provide a rigorous foundation for this advantage by formalizing a model of parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haozhe Jiang , Nika Haghtalab , Lijie Chen

Autoregressive (AR) models have long dominated the landscape of large language models, driving progress across a wide range of tasks. Recently, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative, though their advantages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mihir Prabhudesai , Mengning Wu , Amir Zadeh , Katerina Fragkiadaki , Deepak Pathak

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

Continuous diffusion has been the foundation of high-fidelity, controllable, and few-step generation of many data modalities such as images. However, in language modeling, prior continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) lag behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yuxin Chen , Chumeng Liang , Hangke Sui , Ruihan Guo , Chaoran Cheng , Jiaxuan You , Ge Liu

Transformer-based language models (LMs) are inefficient in long contexts. We propose Dodo, a solution for context compression. Instead of one vector per token in a standard transformer model, Dodo represents text with a dynamic number of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Guanghui Qin , Corby Rosset , Ethan C. Chau , Nikhil Rao , Benjamin Van Durme

Artificial neural networks, especially recent diffusion-based models, have shown remarkable superiority in gaming, control, and QA systems, where the training tasks' datasets are usually static. However, in real-world applications, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Jifeng Hu , Li Shen , Sili Huang , Zhejian Yang , Hechang Chen , Lichao Sun , Yi Chang , Dacheng Tao

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 offer appealing properties for language generation, such as parallel decoding and iterative refinement, but the discrete and highly structured nature of text challenges the direct application of diffusion principles. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Ziqi Jin , Bin Wang , Xiang Lin , Lidong Bing , Aixin Sun

Autoregressive (AR) language models build representations incrementally via left-to-right prediction, while diffusion language models (dLLMs) are trained through full-sequence denoising. Although recent dLLMs match AR performance, whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Raghavv Goel , Risheek Garrepalli , Sudhanshu Agrawal , Chris Lott , Mingu Lee , Fatih Porikli

With the emergence of diffusion models as a frontline generative model, many researchers have proposed molecule generation techniques with conditional diffusion models. However, the unavoidable discreteness of a molecule makes it difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Jinho Chang , Jong Chul Ye

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) provide a fast and flexible alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) via iterative denoising with parallel updates. However, their evaluation is challenging: existing metrics conflate denoiser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Luhan Tang , Longxuan Yu , Shaorong Zhang , Greg Ver Steeg