Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to unmasked context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning.
arXiv:2601. 22954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel.
By Yuezhou Hu, Harman Singh, Monishwaran Maheswaran, Haocheng Xi, Coleman Hooper, Jintao Zhang, Aditya Tomar, Michael W. Mahoney, Sewon Min, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami, Chenfeng Xu
arXiv:2606. 01774v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved broad practical success, but sequential decoding remains a key bottleneck for low-latency deployment.
By Yuchen Zhu, Jing Shi, Chongjian Ge, Hao Tan, Yiran Xu, Wanrong Zhu, Jason Kuen, Koustava Goswami, Rajiv Jain, Yongxin Chen, Molei Tao, Jiuxiang Gu
arXiv:2601. 17917v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a compelling paradigm for natural language generation, leveraging parallel decoding and bidirectional attention to achieve superior global coherence compared to autoregressive models.
By Zhongyu Xiao, Zhiwei Hao, Jianyuan Guo, Yong Luo, Jia Liu, Jie Xu, Han Hu
arXiv:2608. 06628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models by accelerating inference through parallel decoding.
By Jinha Kim, Younghun Roh, Jaeyeon Kim
arXiv:2603. 12996v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parallel decoding for Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) is difficult because each denoising step provides only token-wise marginal distributions, while unmasking multiple tokens simultaneously requires accounting for inter-token dependencies.
By Bumjun Kim, Dongjae Jeon, Moongyu Jeon, Albert No
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with context length and becomes prohibitive for long-context scenarios. We propose Prefilling-dLLM, a training-free prefill-decode disaggregation framework for dLLMs that partitions the prefix into N chunks, caches their KV representations once, and selects the top-K most relevant chunks with intra-chunk token sparsity for decoding, showing that sparse prefilling can outperform dense attention while reducing per-step complexity from quadratic in the full sequence length to quadratic only in the decode length.
arXiv:2601. 23278v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost.
By Kaihua Liang, Xin Tan, An Zhong, Hong Xu, Marco Canini
arXiv:2607. 14107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The inference efficiency of diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is constrained by two challenges: bidirectional attention precludes efficient KV-cache reuse, while increasing decoding parallelism with static confidence thresholds can compromise generation quality.
By Mingyu Lee, Akshat Ramachandran, Souvik Kundu, Tushar Krishna
Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) enable non-autoregressive generation by iteratively denoising corrupted token sequences with bidirectional context. Despite their ability to update multiple positions in parallel, inference remains costly due to the many denoising steps required for high-quality generation.
arXiv:2606. 04236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models can generate text efficiently by updating multiple masked positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a quality-latency trade-off.
By Giries Abu Ayoub, Mario Barbara, Llu\'is Pastor-P\'erez, Tanja Bien, Aneesh Barthakur, Alaa Maalouf, Loay Mualem
arXiv:2607. 14557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models (DMLLMs) are highly effective for multimodal reasoning, yet their inference efficiency is significantly hindered by fixed-length generation constraints.
By Qicheng Zhao, Qi Sun, Zheyu Yan