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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

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 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

Applying pre-trained generative denoising diffusion models (DDMs) for downstream tasks such as image semantic editing usually requires either fine-tuning DDMs or learning auxiliary editing networks in the existing literature. In this work,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Ye Zhu , Yu Wu , Zhiwei Deng , Olga Russakovsky , Yan Yan

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

Most multi-agent systems rely exclusively on autoregressive language models (ARMs) that are based on sequential generation. Although effective for fluent text, ARMs limit global reasoning and plan revision. On the other hand, Discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Lina Berrayana , Ahmed Heakl , Abdullah Sohail , Thomas Hofmann , Salman Khan , Wei Chen

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) approaches, enabling parallel token generation beyond a rigid left-to-right order. Despite growing empirical success, the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yunxiao Zhao , Changxiao Cai

Autoregressive large language models achieve strong results on many benchmarks, but decoding remains fundamentally latency-limited by sequential dependence on previously generated tokens. Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yihao Liang , Ze Wang , Hao Chen , Ximeng Sun , Jialian Wu , Xiaodong Yu , Jiang Liu , Emad Barsoum , Zicheng Liu , Niraj K. Jha

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) promise fast parallel generation, yet open-source DLLMs still face a severe quality-speed trade-off: accelerating decoding by revealing multiple tokens often causes substantial quality degradation. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Fanqin Zeng , Feng Hong , Geng Yu , Huangjie Zheng , Xiaofeng Cao , Ya Zhang , Bo Han , Yanfeng Wang , Jiangchao Yao

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a novel framework for language modeling. MDMs generate sentences by iteratively denoising masked sequences, filling in [MASK] tokens step by step. Although MDMs support any-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Chunsan Hong , Seonho An , Min-Soo Kim , Jong Chul Ye

We present DiffusionBERT, a new generative masked language model based on discrete diffusion models. Diffusion models and many pre-trained language models have a shared training objective, i.e., denoising, making it possible to combine the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Zhengfu He , Tianxiang Sun , Kuanning Wang , Xuanjing Huang , Xipeng Qiu

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) decoding with appealing efficiency and modeling properties, yet their implications for agentic multi-step decision making remain underexplored. We…

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

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art image generation but remain computationally costly due to iterative denoising. Latent-space models like Stable Diffusion reduce overhead yet lose fine detail, while retrieval-augmented methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bilal Faye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

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

Guiding unconditional diffusion models typically requires either retraining with conditional inputs or per-step gradient computations (e.g., classifier-based guidance), both of which incur substantial computational overhead. We present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Qingsong Wang , Mikhail Belkin , Yusu Wang

When Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) generate sequences through iterative refinement, the rich internal computation over masked positions is discarded, forcing every subsequent refinement step to recompute the valuable internal information…

Activation steering methods control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Arthur Vogels , Benjamin Wong , Yann Choho , Annabelle Blangero , Milan Bhan

Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have recently attracted increasing attention by showing impressive synthesis quality. DDMs are built on a diffusion process that pushes data to the noise distribution and the models learn to denoise. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Jaemoo Choi , Yesom Park , Myungjoo Kang

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) dominate high-quality image generation, yet integrating representation learning with generative modeling remains a challenge. We introduce a novel generative image modeling framework that seamlessly bridges…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Theodoros Kouzelis , Efstathios Karypidis , Ioannis Kakogeorgiou , Spyros Gidaris , Nikos Komodakis