arXiv Machine Learning

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.

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 8

Diffusion Language Model Parallel Decoding via Product-of-Experts Bridge

arXiv:2606. 08048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer substantial speed advantages through parallel decoding, but the lack of token dependencies limits generation quality compared to autoregressive (AR) models.

By Juntong Shi, Brian L. Trippe, Jure Leskovec, Stefano Ermon, Minkai Xu

llms diffusion

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 5

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.

By Tianyi Li, Mingda Chen, Bowei Guo, Zhiqiang Shen

llms diffusion nlp efficiency multimodal benchmarks

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

llms agents diffusion efficiency benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 2

SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

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

llms diffusion efficiency benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 11

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

arXiv:2606. 11552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation.

By Lexington Whalen, Yuki Ito, Ryo Sakamoto

llms diffusion benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jul 17

In-Place Tokenizer Expansion for Pre-trained LLMs

arXiv:2607. 15232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A tokenizer fixed at the start of pre-training allocates vocabulary in proportion to the pre-training corpus, reflecting the deployment priorities at that time.

By Jimmy T. H. Smith, Tarek Dakhran, Alberto Cabrera, Simon S. Lee, Paul Pak, Aditya Tadimeti, Tim Seyde, Maxime Labonne, Alexander Amini, Mathias Lechner

llms rag nlp

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

llms diffusion efficiency

arXiv Machine Learning

Aug 6

Esoteric Language Models: A Family of Any-Order Diffusion LLMs

arXiv:2506. 01928v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation.

By Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Zhihan Yang, Yash Akhauri, Johnna Liu, Deepansha Singh, Zhoujun Cheng, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, John Thickstun, Arash Vahdat

llms diffusion

arXiv Computation and Language

Aug 21

Remask, Don't Replace: Token-to-Mask Refinement in Diffusion Language Models

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

llms diffusion

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 11

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

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

llms diffusion

arXiv AI

Jul 24

Understanding and Accelerating the Training of Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2605. 13026v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling.

By Chunsan Hong, Sanghyun Lee, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Satoshi Hayakawa, Yuhta Takida, Yuki Mitsufuji, Seungryong Kim, Jong Chul Ye

llms diffusion benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Sep 1

DIP: Dynamic In-Context Planner For Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2601.03199v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for general natural language tasks with in-context examples. Existing In-Context...

By Yang Li, Han Meng, Chenan Wang, Zhenyu Bi, Xuan Wang, Haipeng Chen

llms diffusion benchmarks

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