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While state-of-the-art language models achieve impressive results through next-token prediction, they have inherent limitations such as the inability to revise already generated tokens. This has prompted exploration of alternative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Dimitri von Rütte , Janis Fluri , Yuhui Ding , Antonio Orvieto , Bernhard Schölkopf , Thomas Hofmann

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking"…

Discrete diffusion models offer global context awareness and flexible parallel generation. However, uniform random noise schedulers in standard DLLM training overlook the highly non-uniform information density inherent in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Linrui Ma , Yufei Cui , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

We present a masked diffusion language modeling framework for data-efficient training for the BabyLM 2025 Challenge. Our approach applies diffusion training objectives to language modeling under strict data constraints, incorporating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Despoina Kosmopoulou , Efthymios Georgiou , Vaggelis Dorovatas , Georgios Paraskevopoulos , Alexandros Potamianos

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

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

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Julianna Piskorz , Cristina Pinneri , Alvaro Correia , Motasem Alfarra , Risheek Garrepalli , Christos Louizos

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) are emerging as a powerful alternative to the dominant Autoregressive Large Language Models, offering efficient parallel generation and capable global context modeling. However, the practical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Jinsong Li , Xiaoyi Dong , Yuhang Zang , Yuhang Cao , Jiaqi Wang , Dahua Lin

We present CadLLM, a training-free method to accelerate the inference throughput of diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs). We first investigate the dynamic nature of token unmasking confidence across blocks and steps. Based on this observation, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Jucheng Shen , Gaurav Sarkar , Yeonju Ro , Sharath Nittur Sridhar , Zhangyang Wang , Aditya Akella , Souvik Kundu

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a strong alternative to autoregressive models by enabling parallel text generation. To improve inference efficiency and KV-cache compatibility, prior work commonly adopts block-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yingte Shu , Yuchuan Tian , Chao Xu , Yunhe Wang , Hanting Chen

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) enable breakthroughs in reasoning and parallel decoding but suffer from prohibitive quadratic computational complexity and memory overhead during inference. Current caching techniques accelerate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Yuerong Song , Xiaoran Liu , Ruixiao Li , Zhigeng Liu , Zengfeng Huang , Qipeng Guo , Ziwei He , Xipeng Qiu

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models, yet their inference strategies remain limited to prefix-based prompting inherited from the autoregressive paradigm. In this paper,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Junhoo Lee , Seungyeon Kim , Nojun Kwak

Diffusion (Large) Language Models (dLLMs) now match the downstream performance of their autoregressive counterparts on many tasks, while holding the promise of being more efficient during inference. One critical design aspect of dLLMs is…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a promising path toward low-latency generation through parallel decoding, but their practical efficiency depends heavily on the decoding trajectory. In practice, this advantage often fails to fully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Lingjie Chen , Ruizhong Qiu , Yuyu Fan , Yanjun Zhao , Hanghang Tong

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

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 language models (DLMs) are an attractive alternative to autoregressive models because they promise sublinear-time, parallel generation, yet practical gains remain elusive as high-quality samples still demand hundreds of refinement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Hasan Amin , Yuan Gao , Yaser Souri , Subhojit Som , Ming Yin , Rajiv Khanna , Xia Song

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently achieved strong results in text generation. However, their multi-step sampling leads to slow inference, limiting practical use. To address this, we extend Inverse Distillation, a technique…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 David Li , Nikita Gushchin , Dmitry Abulkhanov , Eric Moulines , Ivan Oseledets , Maxim Panov , Alexander Korotin

While Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-modal generation, performing precise, training-free image editing remains an open challenge. Unlike continuous diffusion models, the discrete…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Zifeng Zhu , Jiaming Han , Jiaxiang Zhao , Minnan Luo , Xiangyu Yue

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a compelling non-autoregressive alternative to standard large language models; however, their application to morphologically rich languages remains limited. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Şuayp Talha Kocabay , Talha Rüzgar Akkuş