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Autoregressive language models decode left-to-right with irreversible commitments, limiting revision during multi-step reasoning. We propose \textbf{VDLM}, a modular variable diffusion language model that separates semantic planning from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Shuhui Qu

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

Despite remarkable progress in autoregressive language models, alternative generative paradigms beyond left-to-right generation are still being actively explored. Discrete diffusion models, with the capacity for parallel generation, have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Minkai Xu , Tomas Geffner , Karsten Kreis , Weili Nie , Yilun Xu , Jure Leskovec , Stefano Ermon , Arash Vahdat

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

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

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…

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 (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…

While Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising non-autoregressive paradigm comparable to autoregressive (AR) models, their faithfulness, specifically regarding hallucination, remains largely underexplored. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhengnan Guo , Fei Tan

Watermarking (WM) is a critical mechanism for detecting and attributing AI-generated content. Current WM methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly tailored for autoregressive (AR) models: They rely on tokens being generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Ofek Raban , Ethan Fetaya , Gal Chechik

Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Houxing Ren , Mingjie Zhan , Zimu Lu , Ke Wang , Yunqiao Yang , Haotian Hou , Junting Pan , Hongsheng Li

Diffusion models offer appealing properties for language generation, such as parallel decoding and iterative refinement, but the discrete and highly structured nature of text challenges the direct application of diffusion principles. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Ziqi Jin , Bin Wang , Xiang Lin , Lidong Bing , Aixin Sun

Diffusion language models have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models. Beyond next-token generation, they are more efficient and flexible by enabling parallel and any-order token generation. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chenxiao Yang , Cai Zhou , David Wipf , Zhiyuan Li

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as a compelling alternative to dominant autoregressive models, replacing strictly sequential token generation with iterative denoising and parallel generation dynamics. However, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jingyi Yang , Yuxian Jiang , Xuhao Hu , Shuang Cheng , Biqing Qi , Jing Shao

Controlling the behavior of language models (LMs) without re-training is a major open problem in natural language generation. While recent works have demonstrated successes on controlling simple sentence attributes (e.g., sentiment), there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Xiang Lisa Li , John Thickstun , Ishaan Gulrajani , Percy Liang , Tatsunori B. Hashimoto

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

We introduce the first watermark tailored for diffusion language models (DLMs), an emergent LLM paradigm able to generate tokens in arbitrary order, in contrast to standard autoregressive language models (ARLMs) which generate tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Thibaud Gloaguen , Robin Staab , Nikola Jovanović , Martin Vechev

Large language models (LLMs) are often used in environments where facts evolve, yet factual knowledge updates via fine-tuning on unstructured text often suffer from 1) reliance on compute-heavy paraphrasing augmentation and 2) the reversal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xu Pan , Ely Hahami , Jingxuan Fan , Ziqian Xie , Haim Sompolinsky

Post-training pretrained autoregressive models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) has emerged as a cost-effective way to overcome the limitations of sequential generation. Yet it remains unclear whether post-trained MDMs acquire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Injin Kong , Hyoungjoon Lee , Yohan Jo

Synthetic tabular data generation has attracted growing attention due to its importance for data augmentation, foundation models, and privacy. However, real-world tabular datasets increasingly contain free-form text fields (e.g., reviews or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Donghong Cai , Jiarui Feng , Yanbo Wang , Da Zheng , Yixin Chen , Muhan Zhang