arXiv AI

Less Uniform Discrete Diffusion is More Powerful and Scalable

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 29

Masked Language Flow Models

arXiv:2606. 27617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) promise fast, parallel language generation, but their reverse transition factorises across token positions -- an approximation that breaks down in the few-step sampling regime where parallel generation ought to provide the greatest efficiency gains.

By Iskander Azangulov, Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi, Leo Zhang, Simon Vary, Patrick Rebeschini
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 Machine Learning
Jun 3

Learning Unmasking Policies for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2512. 09106v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion (Large) Language Models (dLLMs) now match the downstream performance of their autoregressive counterparts on many tasks, while holding the promise of being more efficient during inference.

By Metod Jazbec, Theo X. Olausson, Louis B\'ethune, Pierre Ablin, Michael Kirchhof, Jo\~ao Monteiro, Victor Turrisi, Jason Ramapuram, Marco Cuturi
arXiv AI
Jun 3

$R^2$-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models via Spatio-Temporal Redundancy Reduction

arXiv:2604. 18995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction.

By Zhenbang Du, Kejing Xia, Xinrui Zhong, Yonggan Fu, Nicolai Oswald, Binfei Ji, Brucek Khailany, Pavlo Molchanov, Yingyan Lin
arXiv AI
Jun 2

SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606. 02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding.

By Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Dependency-Aware Revocable Decoding for Efficient Diffusion Large Language Model Inference

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 Machine Learning
Sep 4

Unlocking Lossless Speedups in LLMs via Discrete Diffusion

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.

By Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Lingjie Chen, Khiem Pham, Jonathan Geuter, Chaitanya Dwivedi, Varad Pimpalkhute, Yash Akhauri, Alexander Moreno, Mikhail Yurochkin, Zhenting Wang, Mostafa Elhoushi, Nolan Dey, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness, John Thickstun, Eric Xing, Zhengzhong Liu