Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge.
The paper introduces Dependency-Aware Revocable Decoding (DARD), a training‑free framework for diffusion large language models that separates tokens into masked, candidate, and unmasked states. DARD verifies candidate tokens using a selective context that excludes less reliable tokens and adaptively regulates their influence on subsequent decoding. Experiments on 12 textual and multimodal benchmarks across three open‑source dLLMs show that DARD improves the speed‑quality Pareto frontier, achieving a 2.71× speedup and a 4.35‑point CIDEr gain over Saber on Flickr30K.
By Wooje Park, Insu Lee, Minyoung Noh, Jaeyun Jang, Sungmin Lee, Kyuhong Shim, Byonghyo Shim
arXiv:2609.37974v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate text by unmasking several tokens per step, but they are trained and sampled under different conditions. The m...
By Manuel Madeira, Amitis Shidani, Alice Bizeul, Victor Turrisi, Louis B\'ethune, Bhavika Devnani, Dan Busbridge, Pierre Ablin, Jo\~ao Monteiro
arXiv:2606. 02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding.
By Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang
The paper introduces probe guidance, a technique that leverages frozen internal states of a diffusion model to generate a guidance signal without requiring an extra forward pass during inference. This method improves continuous diffusion language models, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on unconditional generation and enhancing performance on multiple‑choice question answering for a 1.7B model. The authors also use probes to analyze autoguidance, revealing that the weak model must originate from a low‑entropy training region to align dynamics with the strong model.
By Rohit Dilip, Tianrong Chen, Yuyang Wang, David Van Valen, Joshua Susskind, Miguel Angel Bautista
Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes.
arXiv:2606. 16847v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising avenue for parallel generation but face a trade-off between decoding speed and quality.
By Yizhen Yao, Qinglin Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Xiangxiang Dai, Yanzheng Xiang, Yulan He, Lin Gui
arXiv:2609.38536v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) promise to break the sequential latency bottleneck of autoregressive agents through parallel decoding,...
By Jiacheng Qiu, Christopher E. Mower, Jan Peters, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Matthieu Zimmer
arXiv:2604. 18995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction.
By Zhenbang Du, Kejing Xia, Xinrui Zhong, Yonggan Fu, Nicolai Oswald, Binfei Ji, Brucek Khailany, Pavlo Molchanov, Yingyan Lin
arXiv:2604. 18738v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, filling multiple masked positions at each step.
By Lin Yao
arXiv:2606. 12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation.
By Stipe Frkovic, Metod Jazbec, Dan Zhang, Christian A. Naesseth, Ilija Bogunovic, Eric Nalisnick
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