arXiv Machine Learning

A Comparative analysis of Layer-wise Representational Capacity in AR and Diffusion LLMs

arXiv:2603. 07475v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) language models build representations incrementally via left-to-right prediction, while diffusion language models (dLLMs) are trained through full-sequence denoising.

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
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 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
arXiv AI
4d ago

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.

By Kaibo Wang, Ding Ding, Fangyu Ding, Zijin Feng, Han Shi, Haili Bai, Jiacheng Sun, Yang Xiang
arXiv AI
Jul 20

DiffuMamba: High-Throughput Diffusion LMs with Mamba Backbone

arXiv:2511. 15927v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, yet their reliance on Transformer backbones limits inference efficiency due to quadratic attention or KV-cache overhead.

By Vaibhav Singh, Oleksiy Ostapenko, Pierre-Andr\'e No\"el, Eugene Belilovsky, Torsten Scholak
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Zarya: A Hybrid Autoregressive--Masked Diffusion Language Model with Flexible Training and Dual-Mode Inference

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.

By Leonid Sinev, Ilya Koziev, Vladislav Leshchuk