The article "Foundations of Diffusion Models in General State Spaces: A Self-Contained Introduction" presents a unified primer on diffusion models that applies to both continuous Euclidean data and discrete categorical structures. It develops discrete-time forward noising via Markov kernels and learned reverse dynamics, and connects these to continuous-time limits such as stochastic differential equations in ρ^d and continuous-time Markov chains on finite alphabets, deriving the corresponding Fokker–Planck and master equations. The work also shows how different forward corruption choices—Gaussian processes for continuous spaces and structured categorical transition kernels for discrete spaces—affect reverse dynamics and the evidence lower bound used in training, offering a layered exposition for newcomers, practitioners, and experts alike.
arXiv:2605. 17232v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology.
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.
arXiv:2209. 14125v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion models have proven to be a flexible and effective framework for modelling probability distributions on finite-dimensional spaces.
arXiv:2608. 02799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are typically formulated using continuous-time stochastic differential equations and measure-theoretic stochastic calculus.
arXiv:2510. 22778v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a free-probabilistic framework for denoising diffusion, in which the data is a self-adjoint operator and its law a spectral distribution.
Discrete denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have recently emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) modeling for discrete data, offering parallel generation and iterative global refinement capabilities. Unlike continuous diffusion, where the state space is fixed, DDMs are fundamentally shaped by how the discrete state space is constructed: the tokenization scheme, the vocabulary topology, and domain-specific structural alphabets.
arXiv:2607. 13431v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have recently emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) modeling for discrete data, offering parallel generation and iterative global refinement capabilities.
We introduce Sticky Jump Diffusions (SJDs), continuous-time Markov processes on $\mathbb R^d$ whose discrete anchors are token embeddings. In forward time, anchors release their mass at a hazard rate and the released mass diffuses in the continuous ambient space; time reversal couples a score-driven SDE with a sticky jump kernel whose rate and destination are fixed by flux balance with the forward law.
arXiv:2606. 04324v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the primary challenges in Bayesian inference on the parameters of a diffusion model from discrete observations is the unavailability of an analytical expression for the transition density function between consecutive observation times, which is needed to derive the likelihood function.
arXiv:2607. 10951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Sticky Jump Diffusions (SJDs), continuous-time Markov processes on $\mathbb R^d$ whose discrete anchors are token embeddings.
One of the primary challenges in Bayesian inference on the parameters of a diffusion model from discrete observations is the unavailability of an analytical expression for the transition density function between consecutive observation times, which is needed to derive the likelihood function. Extending previous studies that solve Fokker-Planck (FP) type partial differential equations with Normalizing Flows, we propose a new Normalizing Flow architecture to learn the transition density function of the diffusion process between two observation times.
arXiv:2607. 05381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What does a discrete diffusion model learn: a denoiser, a score ratio, or a bridge plug-in predictor?