Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) enable non-autoregressive generation by iteratively denoising corrupted token sequences with bidirectional context. Despite their ability to update multiple positions in parallel, inference remains costly due to the many denoising steps required for high-quality generation.
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.
By Thomas Bertolani, Davide Bucciarelli, Leonardo Zini, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi
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
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: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
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
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.
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:2606. 04236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models can generate text efficiently by updating multiple masked positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a quality-latency trade-off.
By Giries Abu Ayoub, Mario Barbara, Llu\'is Pastor-P\'erez, Tanja Bien, Aneesh Barthakur, Alaa Maalouf, Loay Mualem
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
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
arXiv:2606. 06474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models generate text by iteratively denoising an entire response in parallel.
By Paul J\"unger, Justin Lovelace, Linxi Zhao, Dongyoung Go, Kilian Q. Weinberger