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Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising a masked sequence, repeatedly deciding which positions to commit at each step. Standard decoding follows a greedy rule: unmask the most confident positions, yet this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Mingyu Cao , Alvaro H. C. Correia , Christos Louizos , Shiwei Liu , Lu Yin

Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hanhan Zhou , Shamik Roy , Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Large language models have achieved remarkable success under the autoregressive paradigm, yet high-quality text generation need not be tied to a fixed left-to-right order. Existing alternatives still struggle to jointly achieve generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hongcan Guo , Qinyu Zhao , Yian Zhao , Shen Nie , Rui Zhu , Qiushan Guo , Feng Wang , Tao Yang , Hengshuang Zhao , Guoqiang Wei , Yan Zeng

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

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities that benefits from online reinforcement learning (RL). These capabilities have primarily been demonstrated within the left-to-right autoregressive (AR)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Siyan Zhao , Devaansh Gupta , Qinqing Zheng , Aditya Grover

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

Autoregressive language models decode left-to-right with irreversible commitments, limiting revision during multi-step reasoning. We propose \textbf{VDLM}, a modular variable diffusion language model that separates semantic planning from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Shuhui Qu

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for text generation and are becoming a competitive alternative to autoregressive models. The denoising strategy plays an important role in determining the quality of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Haojin Yang , Rui Hu , Zequn Sun , Rui Zhou , Yujun Cai , Yiwei Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have recently attracted considerable interest for their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, such as chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches to enhance this ability rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Xinyi Wang , Lucas Caccia , Oleksiy Ostapenko , Xingdi Yuan , William Yang Wang , Alessandro Sordoni

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

As large language models (LLMs) scale up, accuracy improves, but the autoregressive (AR) nature of decoding increases latency since each token requires a serial forward pass. Speculative decoding addresses this by employing a fast drafter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Guanghao Li , Zhihui Fu , Min Fang , Qibin Zhao , Ming Tang , Chun Yuan , Jun Wang

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…

Language models based on discrete diffusion have attracted widespread interest for their potential to provide faster generation than autoregressive models. Despite their promise, these models typically produce samples whose quality sharply…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Chanhyuk Lee , Jaehoon Yoo , Manan Agarwal , Sheel Shah , Jerry Huang , Aditi Raghunathan , Seunghoon Hong , Nicholas M. Boffi , Jinwoo Kim

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

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on complex reasoning tasks by generating multiple chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, but using a fixed token budget per query leads to over-computation on easy inputs and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Katrina Brown , Aneesh Muppidi , Rana Shahout

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 large language models (dLLMs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs, have recently shown strong results in pretraining. However, due to their lack of tractable sequence-level likelihoods, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Anthony Zhan

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for general natural language tasks with in-context examples. However, due to the bidirectional attention mechanism, DLMs incur substantial computational cost as context length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Yang Li , Han Meng , Chenan Wang , Haipeng Chen

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zachary Horvitz , Raghav Singhal , Hao Zou , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Zhou Yu , Rajesh Ranganath , Kathleen McKeown

Diffusion language models generate text through iterative refinement, a process that is often computationally inefficient because many tokens reach stability long before the final denoising step. We introduce a training-free, token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Zahar Kohut , Severyn Shykula , Dmytro Khamula , Mykola Vysotskyi , Taras Rumezhak , Volodymyr Karpiv