arXiv Computation and Language

A Ticket from Marginals to Joints: Coupled-Noise Distillation for One-Step Block Generation in Diffusion Language Models

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 Machine Learning
Jun 2

Consistent Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2605. 00161v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) are an attractive alternative to autoregressive models because they promise sublinear-time, parallel generation, yet practical gains remain elusive as high-quality samples still demand hundreds of refinement steps.

By Hasan Amin, Yuan Gao, Yaser Souri, Subhojit Som, Ming Yin, Rajiv Khanna, Xia Song
arXiv AI
Jul 28

UNIFUSION: Adapting Autoregressive Language Models into Discrete Diffusion under a Unified Reverse-Rate Objective

arXiv:2607. 24507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing methods mainly adapt pretrained autoregressive (AR) language models to masked diffusion, whereas we directly adapt them to uniform-noise diffusion, where every token remains editable during sampling.

By Xiaoyi Jiang, Jingyuan Li, Yixuan Jiang, Wei Liu, Yi Zhu, Zuoqiang Shi, Pipi Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

DLM-One: Diffusion Language Models for One-Step Sequence Generation

The paper introduces DLM-One, a score‑distillation framework that enables one‑step sequence generation with continuous diffusion language models (DLMs). By aligning a student model’s outputs with a pretrained teacher DLM’s score function in the forward‑diffused noisy space, DLM-One removes the need for iterative refinement. Experiments across various DLM architectures show up to ~2000× speedup in sampling steps and ~500× in wall‑clock time while retaining competitive performance, and the authors propose an adversarially‑regularized two‑stage training scheme to mitigate student degeneration.

By Tianqi Chen, Shujian Zhang, Mingyuan Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

BARD: Bridging AutoRegressive and Diffusion Vision-Language Models Via Highly Efficient Progressive Block Merging and Stage-Wise Distillation

arXiv:2604. 16514v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) deliver strong multimodal capability, but their token-by-token decoding imposes a fundamental inference bottleneck.

By Baoyou Chen, Hanchen Xia, Peng Tu, Haojun Shi, Liwei Zhang, Yuxuan Yao, Weihao Yuan, Siyu Zhu