A Survey on Diffusion Language Models
arXiv:2508. 10875v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm.
arXiv:2508. 10875v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm.
arXiv:2603. 12996v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parallel decoding for Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) is difficult because each denoising step provides only token-wise marginal distributions, while unmasking multiple tokens simultaneously requires accounting for inter-token dependencies.
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.
arXiv:2610.02193v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive generation for tasks demanding bidirectional reasoning and global...
arXiv:2606. 04236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models can generate text efficiently by updating multiple masked positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a quality-latency trade-off.
arXiv:2606. 19475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks.
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.
Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) enable non-autoregressive generation by iteratively denoising corrupted token sequences with bidirectional context. Despite their ability to update multiple positions in parallel, inference remains costly due to the many denoising steps required for high-quality generation.
PlaidQ is a 0.7B continuous diffusion language model designed for code generation. By distilling its iterative refinement trajectory into only a few denoising steps—or even a single step—PlaidQ achieves competitive performance with discrete diffusion models while dramatically reducing inference time. The study demonstrates that continuous diffusion can be effectively compressed, enabling efficient and accurate code generation with minimal computational overhead.
The paper introduces Window-Diffusion, a method that accelerates diffusion language model inference by pruning and caching tokens within a sliding window. It categorizes undecoded tokens into active, buffer, and far-field groups, computing only the first two while discarding the rest. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream demonstrate up to 99× speedup with minimal loss in generation quality.
The paper introduces a training‑free structured suffix modeling technique to accelerate Diffusion Language Models (DLMs). It partitions the suffix into local, middle, and tail regions, retaining varying numbers of tokens per region and incorporating previous decoding results into current token representations. Experiments on three DLMs show significant speedups—up to 72.81× in long‑sequence inference—while often improving performance, and the method is compatible with existing acceleration strategies.
arXiv:2601. 17917v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a compelling paradigm for natural language generation, leveraging parallel decoding and bidirectional attention to achieve superior global coherence compared to autoregressive models.