arXiv Machine Learning

BARD: Bridging AutoRegressive and Diffusion Vision-Language Models Via Highly Efficient Progressive Block Merging and Stage-Wise Distillation

arXiv:2604. 16514v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) deliver strong multimodal capability, but their token-by-token decoding imposes a fundamental inference bottleneck.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Video-Rate Streaming Stylization on a Vision-Aware MLLM-Conditioned Edit Diffusion: Asymmetric Batched Inference on a Distilled UNet + MLLM Text Encoder

arXiv:2606. 05981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aggressive distillation of the diffusion U-Net inverts the per-frame bottleneck of real-time text-to-image pipelines: once the denoiser is a 4-step or 1-step distilled student, the text encoder becomes the critical path.

By Yoshiyuki Ootani
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
Aug 10

WAM-Diff2: Hierarchical AR-to-Diffusion Distillation for Highly Efficient Autonomous Driving VLA

arXiv:2608. 01035v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a prominent paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving; however, their efficient deployment is severely constrained by high computational latency and exposure bias arising from sequential autoregressive decoding.

By Zhihao Zhu, Hanlin Shang, Mingwang Xu, Feipeng Cai, Zhuolin He, Yaoyi Li, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Siyu Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Dynamic-dLLM: Dynamic Cache-Budget and Adaptive Parallel Decoding for Training-Free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM

arXiv:2606. 26120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models, excelling in text generation tasks due to their bidirectional attention mechanisms.

By Tianyi Wu, Xiaoxi Sun, Yanhua Jiao, Yulin Li, Yixin Chen, YunHao Cao, YiQi Hu, Zhuotao Tian
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Argus-Unified: Towards A Compact and Economical Unified Model for Image Understanding and Generation

arXiv:2607. 25527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unifying visual understanding and generation in one model holds immense promise, but remains challenging and expensive due to heavy compute and data demands and conflicts between the visual features needed for these two capabilities.

By Weiming Zhuang, Jiabo Huang, Jingtao Li, Zhizhong Li, Chen Chen, Sina Sajadmanesh, Lingjuan Lyu