A Survey on Diffusion Language Models
arXiv:2508. 10875v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm.
The paper introduces self‑orchestrating language models that annotate semantic dependence—identifying which tokens rely on others—to guide efficient inference. By leveraging these annotations, the authors design runtimes that parallelize autoregressive decoding, evict intermediate context, or determine denoising orders, achieving Pareto‑optimal quality‑efficiency trade‑offs. Three systems—PASTA, TIP, and Planned Diffusion—demonstrate these techniques for parallel decoding, memory‑efficient reasoning, and efficient discrete diffusion, respectively.
arXiv:2508. 10875v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm.
arXiv:2606. 19475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks.
arXiv:2607. 12829v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a theoretical advantage in parallel generation over standard autoregressive models.
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.
arXiv:2606. 27732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) recover masked tokens in parallel, offering significant speedups over autoregressive (AR) generation.
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.
arXiv:2606. 26120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models, excelling in text generation tasks due to their bidirectional attention mechanisms.
arXiv:2609.15177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) promise fast inference by generating multiple tokens in parallel, but suffer severe performance degradation when para...
arXiv:2608. 06628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models by accelerating inference through parallel decoding.
arXiv:2505.16990v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we propose Dimple, the first Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Model (DMLLM). We observe that training with a purely discr...
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.
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.