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Masked diffusion models (MDM) are powerful generative models for discrete data that generate samples by progressively unmasking tokens in a sequence. Each token can take one of two states: masked or unmasked. We observe that token sequences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Chen-Hao Chao , Wei-Fang Sun , Hanwen Liang , Chun-Yi Lee , Rahul G. Krishnan

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Shen Nie , Fengqi Zhu , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Qian Liu , Guangtao Zeng , Min Lin , Chongxuan Li

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive language models by enabling parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, their inference speed is significantly limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Satyam Goyal , Kushal Patel , Tanush Mittal , Arjun Laxman

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

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Chunsan Hong , Sanghyun Lee , Chieh-Hsin Lai , Satoshi Hayakawa , Yuhta Takida , Yuki Mitsufuji , Seungryong Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation while achieving competitive performance. Despite these advantages, MDMs face a fundamental limitation: once…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yair Schiff , Omer Belhasin , Roy Uziel , Guanghan Wang , Marianne Arriola , Gilad Turok , Michael Elad , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently gained traction as a viable generative framework for natural language. This can be attributed to its scalability and ease of training compared to other diffusion model paradigms for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Tejomay Kishor Padole , Suyash P Awate , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

In recent years, masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative approach for generative modeling over discrete domains. Compared to autoregressive models (ARMs), MDMs trade off complexity at training time with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Jaeyeon Kim , Kulin Shah , Vasilis Kontonis , Sham Kakade , Sitan Chen

Part of the success of diffusion models stems from their ability to perform iterative refinement, i.e., repeatedly correcting outputs during generation. However, modern masked discrete diffusion lacks this capability: when a token is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guanghan Wang , Yair Schiff , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Diffusion language models have emerged as a promising approach for text generation. One would naturally expect this method to be an efficient replacement for autoregressive models since multiple tokens can be sampled in parallel during each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Guhao Feng , Yihan Geng , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Liwei Wang , Di He

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

Modern language models have historically relied on two dominant design choices: subword tokenization and autoregressive (AR) ordering. These design decisions bake in priors that dictate a model's learning. Recently, two alternative…

Transformer-based diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance at generating high-quality samples. However, our theoretical understanding of the reasons for this success remains limited. For instance, existing models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hongkang Li , Hancheng Min , Rene Vidal

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

Masked (or absorbing) diffusion is actively explored as an alternative to autoregressive models for generative modeling of discrete data. However, existing work in this area has been hindered by unnecessarily complex model formulations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Jiaxin Shi , Kehang Han , Zhe Wang , Arnaud Doucet , Michalis K. Titsias

Masked language modeling has become a standard pretraining objective for training encoder-based language models. In this approach, certain tokens in the input are masked, and the model learns to predict them using the surrounding context.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gokul Srinivasagan , Kai Hartung , Munir Georges

A major bottleneck of standard auto-regressive large language models is that their inference process is inherently sequential, resulting in very long and costly inference times. To circumvent this, practitioners proposed a class of language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sitan Chen , Kevin Cong , Jerry Li

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for generative modeling over discrete domains. It is known that MDMs effectively train to decode tokens in a random order, and that this ordering has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Prateek Garg , Bhavya Kohli , Sunita Sarawagi

Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pengcheng Huang , Tianming Liu , Zhenghao Liu , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Tong Xiao , Zulong Chen , Maosong Sun

Discrete diffusion models enable parallel token sampling for faster inference than autoregressive approaches. However, prior diffusion models use a decoder-only architecture, which requires sampling algorithms that invoke the full network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Marianne Arriola , Yair Schiff , Hao Phung , Aaron Gokaslan , Volodymyr Kuleshov
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