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Diffusion language models are a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for faster generation. Among discrete diffusion approaches, Masked diffusion currently dominates, largely driven by strong perplexity on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Jean-Marie Lemercier , Zhihan Yang , Justin Deschenaux , Jingyu Liu , John Thickstun , Ante Jukic

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

Learning to predict masked tokens in a sequence has been shown to be a helpful pretraining objective for powerful language models such as PaLM2. After training, such masked language models (MLMs) can provide distributions of tokens in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Tom Young , Yunan Chen , Yang You

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have strong theoretical efficiency but are limited by fixed-length decoding and incompatibility with key-value (KV) caches. Block diffusion mitigates these issues, yet still enforces a fixed block size and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yangzhou Liu , Yue Cao , Hao Li , Gen Luo , Zhe Chen , Weiyun Wang , Xiaobo Liang , Biqing Qi , Lijun Wu , Changyao Tian , Yanting Zhang , Yuqiang Li , Tong Lu , Yu Qiao , Jifeng Dai , Wenhai Wang

Diffusion language models offer unique benefits over autoregressive models due to their potential for parallelized generation and controllability, yet they lag in likelihood modeling and are limited to fixed-length generation. In this work,…

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) are gaining attention for their inherent capacity for parallel decoding, offering a compelling alternative to autoregressive LLMs. Among various decoding strategies, block-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guanxi Lu , Hao Mark Chen , Yuto Karashima , Zhican Wang , Daichi Fujiki , Hongxiang Fan

Modern LLM pre-training consumes vast amounts of compute and training data, making the scaling behavior, or scaling laws, of different models a key distinguishing factor. Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) have been proposed as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Dimitri von Rütte , Janis Fluri , Omead Pooladzandi , Bernhard Schölkopf , Thomas Hofmann , Antonio Orvieto

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) have emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation across multiple positions. However, preference alignment of DLLMs remains challenging due to high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Liang Lin , Feng Xiong , Zengbin Wang , Kun Wang , Junhao Dong , Xuecai Hu , Yong Wang , Xiangxiang Chu

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) have been shown to memorize and occasionally reproduce training data verbatim, raising concerns about privacy and copyright liability. Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xiaoyu Luo , Wenrui Yu , Qiongxiu Li , Johannes Bjerva

The application of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces unique challenges and potential deviations from findings in text-only domains, particularly for perception-heavy tasks. This…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zifu Wang , Junyi Zhu , Bo Tang , Zhiyu Li , Feiyu Xiong , Jiaqian Yu , Matthew B. Blaschko

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…

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…

This paper shows how diffusion language models (DLMs) can be used as effective and efficient retrievers. Existing DLM-based retrievers (e.g., DiffEmbed) follow BERT-style encoding, representing each query or passage as a single mean-pooled…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shuai Wang , Yu Yin , Shengyao Zhuang , Bevan Koopman , Guido Zuccon

Auto-regressive models (ARMs) have established a dominant paradigm in language modeling. However, their strictly sequential decoding paradigm imposes fundamental constraints on both inference efficiency and modeling flexibility. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Yuyan Zhou , Kai Syun Hou , Weiyu Chen , James Kwok

Diffusion language models, especially masked discrete diffusion models, have achieved great success recently. While there are some theoretical and primary empirical results showing the advantages of latent reasoning with looped transformers…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Cai Zhou , Chenxiao Yang , Yi Hu , Chenyu Wang , Chubin Zhang , Muhan Zhang , Lester Mackey , Tommi Jaakkola , Stephen Bates , Dinghuai Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced molecular discovery, but existing multimodal molecular architectures fundamentally rely on autoregressive (AR) backbones. This strict left-to-right inductive bias is sub-optimal for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Seohyeon Shin , HanJun Choi , Jun-Hyung Park , Hong Kook Kim , Mansu Kim

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models over discrete domains. MDMs generate sequences in an any-order, parallel fashion, enabling fast inference and strong performance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Jaeyeon Kim , Lee Cheuk-Kit , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Yilun Du , Sham Kakade , Timothy Ngotiaoco , Sitan Chen , Michael Albergo

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art generative performance and have been used as strong pixel-level representation learners. This paper decomposes the interrelation between the generative…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Zixuan Pan , Jianxu Chen , Yiyu Shi

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

Recent provably secure linguistic steganography (PSLS) methods rely on mainstream autoregressive language models (ARMs) to address historically challenging tasks, that is, to disguise covert communication as ``innocuous'' natural language…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Yuang Qi , Na Zhao , Qiyi Yao , Benlong Wu , Weiming Zhang , Nenghai Yu , Kejiang Chen