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While state-of-the-art language models achieve impressive results through next-token prediction, they have inherent limitations such as the inability to revise already generated tokens. This has prompted exploration of alternative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Dimitri von Rütte , Janis Fluri , Yuhui Ding , Antonio Orvieto , Bernhard Schölkopf , Thomas Hofmann

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

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate text by iteratively selecting positions to unmask and then predicting tokens at those positions. Yet MDMs lack proper likelihood evaluation: the evidence lower bound (ELBO) is not only a loose bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Gilad Turok , Chris De Sa , Volodymyr Kuleshov

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 language models have emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive models, enabling fast inference through more flexible and parallel generation paths. This flexibility of sampling is unlocked by new engineered sampling…

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images thanks to their novel training procedures applied to unprecedented amounts of data. However, training a diffusion model from scratch is computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Michał Zając , Kamil Deja , Anna Kuzina , Jakub M. Tomczak , Tomasz Trzciński , Florian Shkurti , Piotr Miłoś

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in various tasks, yet their vast parameter sizes restrict their applicability in resource-constrained settings. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a viable solution by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Rongzhi Zhang , Jiaming Shen , Tianqi Liu , Haorui Wang , Zhen Qin , Feng Han , Jialu Liu , Simon Baumgartner , Michael Bendersky , Chao Zhang

Language models based on discrete diffusion have attracted widespread interest for their potential to provide faster generation than autoregressive models. Despite their promise, these models typically produce samples whose quality sharply…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Chanhyuk Lee , Jaehoon Yoo , Manan Agarwal , Sheel Shah , Jerry Huang , Aditi Raghunathan , Seunghoon Hong , Nicholas M. Boffi , Jinwoo Kim

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

We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Shiyu Wang , Haolin Chen , Liangwei Yang , Jielin Qiu , Rithesh Murthy , Ming Zhu , Zixiang Chen , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Shelby Heinecke , Huan Wang

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 offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their global, non-causal generation process, but their continuous latent dynamics make discrete constraints -- e.g., the output should be a JSON file…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jinwoo Kim , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Loris D'Antoni

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

Diffusion language models (DLMs) provide a bidirectional generation framework naturally suited for infilling, yet their performance is constrained by the pre-specified infilling length. In this paper, we reveal that DLMs possess an inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hengchang Liu , Zhao Yang , Bing Su

Diffusion-based language models (DLLMs) offer non-sequential, block-wise generation and richer data reuse compared to autoregressive (AR) models, but existing code DLLMs still lag behind strong AR baselines under comparable budgets. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Chenghao Fan , Wen Heng , Bo Li , Sichen Liu , Yuxuan Song , Jing Su , Xiaoye Qu , Kai Shen , Wei Wei

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

Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) parallelize text generation by framing decoding as a denoising process, but suffer from high computational overhead since they predict all future suffix tokens at each step while retaining only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Xinhua Chen , Sitao Huang , Cong Guo , Chiyue Wei , Yintao He , Jianyi Zhang , Hai "Helen" Li , Yiran Chen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative for language modeling by enabling parallel decoding through iterative refinement. However, most DLMs rely on hard binary masking and discrete token assignments, which hinder the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Linhao Zhong , Linyu Wu , Bozhen Fang , Tianjian Feng , Chenchen Jing , Wen Wang , Jiaheng Zhang , Hao Chen , Chunhua Shen

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