Related papers: Understanding and Accelerating the Training of Mas…

Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform…

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…

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text generative modeling, potentially addressing limitations of autoregressive (AR) models. However, current DLMs have been studied at a smaller scale compared to…

The tremendous progress in neural image generation, coupled with the emergence of seemingly omnipotent vision-language models has finally enabled text-based interfaces for creating and editing images. Handling generic images requires a…

Masked language modeling (MLM) is a widely used self-supervised pretraining objective, where a model needs to predict an original token that is replaced with a mask given contexts. Although simpler and computationally efficient pretraining…

Training of deep reinforcement learning agents is slowed considerably by the presence of input dimensions that do not usefully condition the reward function. Existing modules such as layer normalization can be trained with weight decay to…

Autoregressive Models (ARMs) have long dominated the landscape of Large Language Models. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in the form of diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs), which generate text by iteratively denoising masked…

Masked discrete diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising new approach to generative modelling, offering the ability for parallel token generation and therefore greater efficiency than autoregressive counterparts. However, achieving an…

The pre-training of masked language models (MLMs) consumes massive computation to achieve good results on downstream NLP tasks, resulting in a large carbon footprint. In the vanilla MLM, the virtual tokens, [MASK]s, act as placeholders and…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is widely used to pretrain language models. The standard random masking strategy in MLM causes the pre-trained language models (PLMs) to be biased toward high-frequency tokens. Representation learning of rare…

Curriculum learning-organizing training data from easy to hard-has improved efficiency across machine learning domains, yet remains underexplored for language model pretraining. We present the first systematic investigation of curriculum…

Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language tasks, yet their inherent sequential decoding limits inference efficiency. In this work, we propose Fast-dLLM v2,…

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…

We propose an efficient approach to train large diffusion models with masked transformers. While masked transformers have been extensively explored for representation learning, their application to generative learning is less explored in…

The reusability of state-of-the-art Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is often limited by their generalization problem, where their performance drastically decreases when evaluated on examples that differ from the training dataset, known…

Language models (LMs) have been instrumental for the rapid advance of natural language processing. This paper studies continual pre-training of LMs, in particular, continual domain-adaptive pre-training (or continual DAP-training). Existing…

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) promise fast, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing samplers, which pick tokens to unmask based on model confidence, ignore interactions when unmasking multiple positions in parallel and…

Masked Language Models (MLM) are self-supervised neural networks trained to fill in the blanks in a given sentence with masked tokens. Despite the tremendous success of MLMs for various text based tasks, they are not robust for spoken…

Diffusion models (DMs) have been adopted across diverse fields with its remarkable abilities in capturing intricate data distributions. In this paper, we propose a Fast Diffusion Model (FDM) to significantly speed up DMs from a stochastic…