The paper introduces the first controlled benchmark for optimizers in discrete diffusion models, evaluating seven optimizers (AdamW, Lion, Muon, SOAP, MARS, MARS‑M, Schedule‑Free) across four diffusion formulations: masked diffusion on text8, uniform diffusion on QM9 and LM1B, and Gaussian diffusion on CelebA‑64. Each optimizer undergoes the same search protocol and is retrained with full budget and multiple seeds, revealing that AdamW, while strong, is not universally optimal and that optimizers validated on autoregressive language models (Muon, MARS‑M, SOAP) can outperform tuned AdamW on certain tasks.
arXiv:2509.25050v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), where both pre-training and RL post-train...
arXiv:2609.37974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate text by unmasking several tokens per step, but they are trained and sampled under different conditions. The m...
arXiv:2607. 24507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing methods mainly adapt pretrained autoregressive (AR) language models to masked diffusion, whereas we directly adapt them to uniform-noise diffusion, where every token remains editable during sampling.
arXiv:2606. 25331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern large language models are predominantly trained with autoregressive factorization and causal attention.
arXiv:2609. 04010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) owe much of their success to next-token prediction (NTP), but their autoregressive (AR) structure requires slow, sequential token generation.
Zarya is a hybrid language model that jointly trains an autoregressive objective and a masked-diffusion objective within a single architecture. It structures training data into variable-size slots and uses a curriculum that gradually increases slot granularity, allowing a smooth transition from fine-grained AR learning to coarse-grained diffusion learning. At inference, Zarya offers two decoding modes—MDM sampling with first-hitting denoising and slotted speculative decoding that interleaves diffusion-based selection with autoregressive infilling—while fully decoupling training and inference regimes and supporting extensive configurability.
arXiv:2505. 23725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints.
arXiv:2606. 19005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models have become a promising alternative to autoregressive models.
arXiv:2606. 11552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation.
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.
Spectral-Guided Diffusion introduces a method to accelerate diffusion inference by identifying and reusing residual branches that need not be recomputed during the trajectory. The approach uses a Spectral Concentration Ratio (SCR) combined with Frobenius magnitude to create an offline sensitivity proxy and deterministic lifetime for each scheduled unit, eliminating the need for routers or input-dependent searches. Experiments on models such as LLaDA-8B, DiT-XL/2, U-ViT-L, and SDXL show that this scheduling preserves quality better than several baselines and achieves up to a 3.0× wall‑clock speedup over eager inference.
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.