arXiv AI

Token Time Continuous Diffusion for Language Modeling

arXiv:2607. 14106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we introduce token time continuous diffusion (TTCD), a new diffusion language model which (a) operates in continuous space, deterministically mapping Gaussian noise to a final token canvas with no further sampling, and crucially (b) incorporates a new notion of per-token times, with some tokens proceeding from noise to token at a faster rate than others.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Unlocking Lossless Speedups in LLMs via Discrete Diffusion

arXiv:2609. 04010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) owe much of their success to next-token prediction (NTP), but their autoregressive (AR) structure requires slow, sequential token generation.

By Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Lingjie Chen, Khiem Pham, Jonathan Geuter, Chaitanya Dwivedi, Varad Pimpalkhute, Yash Akhauri, Alexander Moreno, Mikhail Yurochkin, Zhenting Wang, Mostafa Elhoushi, Nolan Dey, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness, John Thickstun, Eric Xing, Zhengzhong Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
23h ago

Clock Diffusion: Efficient Semi-Autoregressive Continuous Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces Clock Diffusion, a framework for semi‑autoregressive continuous diffusion language models that incorporates position‑dependent noise schedules, efficient training, and sampling algorithms. It presents two generation modes—block and sliding window—and defines ClockDLMs, a family of Gaussian models that achieve state‑of‑the‑art diffusion likelihoods on OpenWebText and outperform continuous baselines on GSM8K while matching or exceeding discrete diffusion models. The authors also propose Cache Grab, a set of efficient samplers that adapt accelerated inference techniques from discrete diffusion to further improve model quality and efficiency.

By Yair Schiff, Omer Belhasin, Roy Uziel, Matan Rusanovsky, Ran Zilberstein, Marianne Arriola, Gilad Turok, Guanghan Wang, Volodymyr Kuleshov, Michael Elad
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Distilled Continuous Diffusion Language Models Can Write Code in Few Steps---or One

PlaidQ is a 0.7B continuous diffusion language model designed for code generation. By distilling its iterative refinement trajectory into only a few denoising steps—or even a single step—PlaidQ achieves competitive performance with discrete diffusion models while dramatically reducing inference time. The study demonstrates that continuous diffusion can be effectively compressed, enabling efficient and accurate code generation with minimal computational overhead.

By Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Kaiwen Zheng, Anru R. Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Enabling Approximate Joint Sampling in Diffusion LMs

The paper introduces a lightweight single‑layer sampler that allows masked diffusion language models to approximate joint sampling of multiple tokens in a single full‑model forward pass. By training the sampler to mimic exact joint sampling from a frozen diffusion model, the authors enable parallel unmasking of tokens while maintaining a close match to the true joint distribution. Experiments on Dream‑7B and Llada‑7B models show that unmasking four tokens per denoising step yields a MAUVE score of 0.87, a substantial improvement over the marginal baseline of 0.31.

By Parikshit Bansal, Sujay Sanghavi
arXiv AI
3d ago

Less Uniform Discrete Diffusion is More Powerful and Scalable

The paper introduces Less Uniform Diffusion (LUDI), a framework that improves uniform diffusion language models by using a less uniform loss and per-token time embeddings to guide reverse transitions and enable confidence-based few-step sampling. Experiments demonstrate that LUDI provides cleaner supervision, enhances few-step generation, and scales to a 7B model (LUDI-7B) that achieves a 3-token-per-step speedup over autoregressive decoding while matching masked diffusion baselines. The work suggests that UDLMs still have untapped potential for complex generation tasks.

By Kaibo Wang, Ding Ding, Fangyu Ding, Zijin Feng, Han Shi, Haili Bai, Jiacheng Sun, Yang Xiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Just on Time: Token-Level Early Stopping for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2602. 11133v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models generate text through iterative refinement, a process that is often computationally inefficient because many tokens reach stability long before the final denoising step.

By Zakhar Kohut, Severyn Shykula, Mykola Vysotskyi, Serhii Dmytryshyn, Dmytro Khamula, Michal Zakrzewski, Damian Rynczak, Jacek Ma{\l}ecki, Taras Rumezhak, Volodymyr Karpiv
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Window-Diffusion: Accelerating Diffusion Language Model Inference with Windowed Token Pruning and Caching

The paper introduces Window-Diffusion, a method that accelerates diffusion language model inference by pruning and caching tokens within a sliding window. It categorizes undecoded tokens into active, buffer, and far-field groups, computing only the first two while discarding the rest. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream demonstrate up to 99× speedup with minimal loss in generation quality.

By Fengrui Zuo, Zhiwei Ke, Yiming Liu, Wenqi Lou, Chao Wang, Xuehai Zhou