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Diffusion Language models (DLMs) are a promising avenue for text generation due to their practical properties on tractable controllable generation. They also have the advantage of not having to predict text autoregressively. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Sofia Maria Lo Cicero Vaina , Nikita Balagansky , Daniil Gavrilov

Diffusion models that are based on iterative denoising have been recently proposed and leveraged in various generation tasks like image generation. Whereas, as a way inherently built for continuous data, existing diffusion models still have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Jiaao Chen , Aston Zhang , Mu Li , Alex Smola , Diyi Yang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caio Vicentino

In this work, we propose Dimple, the first Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Model (DMLLM). We observe that training with a purely discrete diffusion approach leads to significant training instability, suboptimal performance, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Runpeng Yu , Xinyin Ma , Xinchao Wang

Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that enables parallel, non-autoregressive generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To…

Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hanhan Zhou , Shamik Roy , Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Recent masked diffusion language models (MDLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have achieved performance comparable to autoregressive large language models. Unlike autoregressive models, which generate text sequentially, MDLMs generate text by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Georu Lee , Seungwon Jeong , Hoki Kim , Jinseong Park , Woojin Lee

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

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

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) accelerate text generation by unmasking multiple tokens in parallel. However, parallel decoding introduces a distributional mismatch: it approximates the joint conditional using a fully factorized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Liran Ringel , Ameen Ali , Yaniv Romano

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

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 large language models (dLLMs) offer capabilities beyond those of autoregressive (AR) LLMs, such as parallel decoding and random-order generation. However, realizing these benefits in practice is non-trivial, as dLLMs inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yu-Yang Qian , Junda Su , Lanxiang Hu , Peiyuan Zhang , Zhijie Deng , Peng Zhao , Hao Zhang

We present significant extensions to diffusion-based sequence generation models, blurring the line with autoregressive language models. We introduce hyperschedules, which assign distinct noise schedules to individual token positions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Nima Fathi , Torsten Scholak , Pierre-André Noël

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Anej Svete , Ashish Sabharwal

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

We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Edoardo Cetin , Tianyu Zhao , Yujin Tang

This paper introduces DLM-One, a score-distillation-based framework for one-step sequence generation with continuous diffusion language models (DLMs). DLM-One eliminates the need for iterative refinement by aligning the scores of a student…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Tianqi Chen , Shujian Zhang , Mingyuan Zhou

Reparameterized diffusion models (RDMs) have recently matched autoregressive methods in protein generation, motivating their use for challenging tasks such as designing membrane proteins, which possess interleaved soluble and transmembrane…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-30 Shrey Goel , Peregrine M. Schray , Yinuo Zhang , Sophia Vincoff , Huong T. Kratochvil , Pranam Chatterjee

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as strong alternatives to autoregressive language models, matching their performance through large-scale training. However, inference-time control remains relatively underexplored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Meihua Dang , Jiaqi Han , Minkai Xu , Kai Xu , Akash Srivastava , Stefano Ermon