The paper compares the parallelism capabilities of three diffusion large language model paradigms—masked, uniform, and Gaussian diffusion. It proves that uniform and Gaussian diffusion can sample with a number of forward passes scaling with the dual total correlation of the distribution, potentially much less than the context length, whereas masked diffusion may require more passes. The study establishes a provable separation in parallelism, showing that masked diffusion’s critical windows are asymptotically narrower than those of the other two approaches.
arXiv:2606. 09159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable parallel text generation by iteratively denoising a full sequence, offering attractive flexibility compared to auto-regressive (AR) decoding.
arXiv:2606. 10829v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models can reduce inference steps by revealing multiple tokens per denoising iteration, but this parallelism is fragile: positions that are individually confident may be unsafe to commit together when their predictions are coupled.
arXiv:2606. 14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open diffusion language models are marketed as parallel, non-autoregressive decoders, yet the order in which a shipped checkpoint actually commits its tokens is almost never measured.
arXiv:2606. 02955v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models promise parallel token generation, yet inference remains bottlenecked by deciding which masked tokens can be safely committed together.
arXiv:2605. 17232v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology.
The paper revisits the continuous diffusion language model Plaid and introduces RePlaid, aligning its architecture with modern discrete diffusion models. RePlaid achieves a compute gap of only 20× compared to autoregressive models, surpasses Duo with fewer parameters, and outperforms MDLM in over‑trained settings. On OpenWebText, RePlaid sets a new state‑of‑the‑art continuous diffusion perplexity of 22.1 and demonstrates superior generation quality, while theoretical analysis links likelihood‑based training to linear cross‑entropy over time and structured embedding geometries.
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.
arXiv:2605. 11125v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete Diffusion Language Models progressed rapidly as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) models, motivated by their parallel generation abilities.
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. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes.
arXiv:2607. 14106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we introduce token time continuous diffusion (TTCD), a new diffusion language model which (a) operates in continuous space, deterministically mapping Gaussian noise to a final token canvas with no further sampling, and crucially (b) incorporates a new notion of per-token times, with some tokens proceeding from noise to token at a faster rate than others.
arXiv:2601. 07568v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer capabilities beyond those of autoregressive (AR) LLMs, such as parallel decoding and random-order generation.
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.