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.
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.
The paper introduces PILL, a new infilling technique for diffusion language models that eliminates the need for a preset initial length and reduces inference overhead. PILL uses probing-based length-free decoding, cutting down on extra forward passes and speeding up generation. Experiments across five diffusion models and eight benchmarks show PILL outperforms the strongest baseline with higher pass rates and BLEU-2 scores while running 1.82× faster.
arXiv:2610.29255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models have emerged as an alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation. However, standard masked...
arXiv:2610.17590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) have attracted wide attention for their fast, parallel decoding, but they are believed to be far less efficient to t...
arXiv:2606. 15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models.
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...
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.
The paper introduces a training‑free structured suffix modeling technique to accelerate Diffusion Language Models (DLMs). It partitions the suffix into local, middle, and tail regions, retaining varying numbers of tokens per region and incorporating previous decoding results into current token representations. Experiments on three DLMs show significant speedups—up to 72.81× in long‑sequence inference—while often improving performance, and the method is compatible with existing acceleration strategies.
The paper introduces Sigma, a large-scale continuous diffusion language model (3B/8B parameters) that uses steerable, low-dimensional ODE/SDE latent trajectories to address the non-smoothness of discrete diffusion models. Sigma is trained blockwise via likelihood optimization, jointly denoises Gaussian-corrupted token embeddings, and learns an optimal embedding geometry, leveraging pre-trained autoregressive weights for faster training. During inference, classifier-free guidance and score temperature are identified as essential for high-fidelity reasoning and coding, and Sigma matches or exceeds discrete models on benchmarks such as GSM8K, Minerva, HumanEval, MBPP, MATH-500, and AIME, while also revealing unique structural benefits like embedding-space steering and graceful degradation for low NFEs.
arXiv:2610.30066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising sequences of ordinary vocabulary tokens, any of which may be corrupt...
arXiv:2602. 11715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, owing to their capacity for parallel token generation.