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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

Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models, benefiting from large scale pre-training and post-training, have begun to surpass BERT and T5-based models on general-purpose text embedding tasks such as document retrieval. However, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Siyue Zhang , Yilun Zhao , Liyuan Geng , Arman Cohan , Anh Tuan Luu , Chen Zhao

Discrete Diffusion Language Models progressed rapidly as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) models, motivated by their parallel generation abilities. However, for tractability, discrete diffusion models sample from a factorized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Justin Deschenaux , Caglar Gulcehre

Autoregressive (AR) Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success across numerous tasks. However, the AR modeling paradigm presents certain limitations; for instance, contemporary autoregressive LLMs are trained to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Justin Deschenaux , Caglar Gulcehre

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) deliver strong likelihoods, but are inherently serial: they generate one token per forward pass, which limits throughput and inflates latency for long sequences. Diffusion Language Models (DLMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Amin Karimi Monsefi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Manuel Rafael Ciosici , Dominic Culver , Yizhe Zhang , Irina Belousova

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive language models (ARMs), yet the intrinsic differences in their generated text remain underexplored. We first find empirically that off-the-shelf DLMs exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zeyang Zhang , Chengwei Liang , Xingyan Chen , Meiqi Gu , Minrui Luo , Jingzhao Zhang , Tianxing He

Can continuous diffusion models bring the same performance breakthrough on natural language they did for image generation? To circumvent the discrete nature of text data, we can simply project tokens in a continuous space of embeddings, as…

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

Autoregressive models have driven remarkable progress in language modeling. Their foundational reliance on discrete tokens, unidirectional context, and single-pass decoding, while central to their success, also inspires the exploration of a…

Unlike autoregressive language models, which terminate variable-length generation upon predicting an End-of-Sequence (EoS) token, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) operate over a fixed maximum-length context window for a predetermined number…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Vittorio Rossi , Giacomo Cirò , Davide Beltrame , Luca Gandolfi , Paul Röttger , Dirk Hovy

The modern autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance on NLP benchmarks, and they are deployed in the real world. However, they still suffer from limitations of the autoregressive training paradigm.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Justin Deschenaux , Caglar Gulcehre

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have inspired new paradigms for document reranking. While this paradigm better exploits the reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, most existing LLM-based rerankers rely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qi Liu , Kun Ai , Jiaxin Mao , Yanzhao Zhang , Mingxin Li , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Fengbin Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen

Diffusion models have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in modeling discrete categorical data. However, diffusion models that directly work on discrete data space fail to fully exploit the power of iterative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jaehyeong Jo , Sung Ju Hwang

Although autoregressive models have dominated language modeling in recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring alternative paradigms to the conventional next-token prediction framework. Diffusion-based language models have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Chihan Huang , Hao Tang

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) provide a fast and flexible alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) via iterative denoising with parallel updates. However, their evaluation is challenging: existing metrics conflate denoiser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Luhan Tang , Longxuan Yu , Shaorong Zhang , Greg Ver Steeg

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) 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

Unified architectures in multimodal large language models (MLLM) have shown promise in handling diverse tasks within a single framework. In the text-to-speech (TTS) task, current MLLM-based approaches rely on discrete token representations,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-27 Xinlu He , Swayambhu Nath Ray , Harish Mallidi , Jia-Hong Huang , Ashwin Bellur , Chander Chandak , M. Maruf , Venkatesh Ravichandran

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a compelling paradigm for natural language generation, leveraging parallel decoding and bidirectional attention to achieve superior global coherence compared to autoregressive models. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Zhongyu Xiao , Zhiwei Hao , Jianyuan Guo , Yong Luo , Jia Liu , Jie Xu , Han Hu

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiyeon Kim , Sungik Choi , Yongrae Jo , Moontae Lee , Minjoon Seo