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Diffusion LLMs have emerged as a promising alternative to conventional autoregressive LLMs, offering significant potential for improved runtime efficiency. However, existing diffusion models lack the ability to provably enforce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Tarun Suresh , Debangshu Banerjee , Shubham Ugare , Sasa Misailovic , Gagandeep Singh

Diffusion and flow-based models have become the de facto approaches for generating continuous data, e.g., in domains such as images and videos. Their success has attracted growing interest in applying them to language modeling. Unlike their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Keya Hu , Linlu Qiu , Yiyang Lu , Hanhong Zhao , Tianhong Li , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas , Kaiming He

Reinforcement learning has been widely applied to diffusion and flow models for visual tasks such as text-to-image generation. However, these tasks remain challenging because diffusion models have intractable likelihoods, which creates a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jaemoo Choi , Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Jinbin Bai , Yi Xin , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

Diffusion language models offer unique benefits over autoregressive models due to their potential for parallelized generation and controllability, yet they lag in likelihood modeling and are limited to fixed-length generation. In this work,…

Speech-only spoken language models (SLMs) lag behind text and text-speech models in performance, with recent discrete autoregressive (AR) SLMs indicating significant computational and data demands to match text models. Since discretizing…

Despite their groundbreaking performance for many generative modeling tasks, diffusion models have fallen short on discrete data domains such as natural language. Crucially, standard diffusion models rely on the well-established theory of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-10 Aaron Lou , Chenlin Meng , Stefano Ermon

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking"…

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have exhibited substantial potential for parallel text generation, which may enable more efficient generation compared to autoregressive models. However, current dLLMs suffer from fixed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yicun Yang , Cong Wang , Shaobo Wang , Zichen Wen , Biqing Qi , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang

Diffusion models generate high-dimensional data with remarkable quality, yet how their training efficiently learns the score function, bypassing the curse of dimensionality when data is supported on low-dimensional manifolds, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Wei Huang , Andi Han , Mingyuan Bai , Huanjian Zhou , Qixin Zhang , Taiji Suzuki , Kenji Fukumizu

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

Autoregressive (AR) models have long dominated the landscape of large language models, driving progress across a wide range of tasks. Recently, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative, though their advantages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mihir Prabhudesai , Mengning Wu , Amir Zadeh , Katerina Fragkiadaki , Deepak Pathak

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to improve the policy (denoiser) of diffusion large language models (dLLMs), while being hindered by the intractability of the policy likelihood. A dominant and efficient family of methods replaces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xiaohang Tang , Keyue Jiang , Che Liu , Qifang Zhao , Xiaoxiao Xu , Sangwoong Yoon , Ilija Bogunovic

We study why continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) have lagged behind discrete diffusion approaches despite their appealing continuous generative dynamics. Under a controlled token--recovery study, we identify token rounding, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Junzhe Shen , Jieru Zhao , Ziwei He , Zhouhan Lin

Diffusion language models, especially masked discrete diffusion models, have achieved great success recently. While there are some theoretical and primary empirical results showing the advantages of latent reasoning with looped transformers…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Cai Zhou , Chenxiao Yang , Yi Hu , Chenyu Wang , Chubin Zhang , Muhan Zhang , Lester Mackey , Tommi Jaakkola , Stephen Bates , Dinghuai Zhang

This paper presents LLaDA2.0 -- a tuple of discrete diffusion large language models (dLLM) scaling up to 100B total parameters through systematic conversion from auto-regressive (AR) models -- establishing a new paradigm for frontier-scale…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), where pre-training and RL post-training share the same log-likelihood formulation. In contrast, recent RL approaches for diffusion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Shuchen Xue , Chongjian Ge , Shilong Zhang , Yichen Li , Zhi-Ming Ma

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, but extending these methods to diffusion language models (DLMs) is challenging due to intractable sequence-level likelihoods. Existing…

Diffusion LLMs have attracted growing interest, with plenty of recent work emphasizing their great potential in various downstream tasks; yet the long-context behavior of diffusion LLMs remains largely uncharted. We present a case study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Guangxin He , Shen Nie , Fengqi Zhu , Yuankang Zhao , Tianyi Bai , Ran Yan , Jie Fu , Chongxuan Li , Binhang Yuan

Latent diffusion models offer an attractive alternative to discrete diffusion for non-autoregressive text generation by operating on continuous text representations and denoising entire sequences in parallel. The major challenge in latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Viacheslav Meshchaninov , Alexander Shabalin , Egor Chimbulatov , Nikita Gushchin , Ilya Koziev , Alexander Korotin , Dmitry Vetrov

While Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are theoretically well-suited for iterative refinement due to their non-causal structure, they often fail to reliably revise incorrect tokens in practice. The key challenge lies in the model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Shuibai Zhang , Fred Zhangzhi Peng , Yiheng Zhang , Jin Pan , Grigorios G. Chrysos