arXiv Machine Learning

Just on Time: Token-Level Early Stopping for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2602. 11133v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models generate text through iterative refinement, a process that is often computationally inefficient because many tokens reach stability long before the final denoising step.

arXiv AI
3d ago

Less Uniform Discrete Diffusion is More Powerful and Scalable

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
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

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.

By Yuezhou Hu, Harman Singh, Monishwaran Maheswaran, Haocheng Xi, Coleman Hooper, Jintao Zhang, Aditya Tomar, Michael W. Mahoney, Sewon Min, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami, Chenfeng Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

How to Guide Your Language Flow

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to unmasked context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Dependency-Aware Revocable Decoding for Efficient Diffusion Large Language Model Inference

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 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