Related papers: On the Trainability of Masked Diffusion Language M…

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…

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…

We present a controlled empirical comparison between autoregressive (AR) and masked diffusion (MDLM) language models. Both models are trained on identical data (50M tokens from TinyStories), identical compute budget (20,000 steps, batch…

Autoregressive language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggle with complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We introduce discrete diffusion models as a novel solution to these challenges. Through the lens of subgoal…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a potential alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language generation, but generation quality depends critically on the generation order. Prior work either hard-codes an ordering (e.g., blockwise…

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) language models, offering properties such as parallel decoding, flexible generation orders, and the potential for fewer…

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…

Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform…

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…

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…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) for text offer a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive language models. Parallel generation makes them efficient, but their computational capabilities and the limitations inherent in their…

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) promise parallel token generation and arbitrary-order decoding, yet it remains unclear to what extent current models truly realize these capabilities. We characterize MDLM behavior along two…

Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form,…

Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) methods have recently been adapted to dLLM fine-tuning, their objectives typically depend on…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a popular research topic for generative modeling of discrete data, thanks to their superior performance over other discrete diffusion models, and are rivaling the auto-regressive models (ARMs)…

Recent Speech Large Language Models~(LLMs) have achieved impressive capabilities in end-to-end speech interaction. However, the prevailing autoregressive paradigm imposes strict serial constraints, limiting generation efficiency and…

Diffusion-based language models (DLLMs) offer non-sequential, block-wise generation and richer data reuse compared to autoregressive (AR) models, but existing code DLLMs still lag behind strong AR baselines under comparable budgets. We…

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…

Discrete diffusion language models have shown strong potential for text generation, yet standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) misaligns with their semi-autoregressive inference: training randomly masks tokens across the entire response,…