arXiv:2605. 17232v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology.
By Kelvin Kan, Xingjian Li, Benjamin J. Zhang, Tuhin Sahai, Stanley Osher, Markos A. Katsoulakis
The article "Foundations of Diffusion Models in General State Spaces: A Self-Contained Introduction" presents a unified primer on diffusion models that applies to both continuous Euclidean data and discrete categorical structures. It develops discrete-time forward noising via Markov kernels and learned reverse dynamics, and connects these to continuous-time limits such as stochastic differential equations in ρ^d and continuous-time Markov chains on finite alphabets, deriving the corresponding Fokker–Planck and master equations. The work also shows how different forward corruption choices—Gaussian processes for continuous spaces and structured categorical transition kernels for discrete spaces—affect reverse dynamics and the evidence lower bound used in training, offering a layered exposition for newcomers, practitioners, and experts alike.
By Vincent Pauline, Tobias H\"oppe, Kirill Neklyudov, Alexander Tong, Stefan Bauer, Andrea Dittadi
arXiv:2606. 16610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) has recently emerged as a versatile framework for generative modeling, yet its theoretical convergence properties remain only partially understood.
By Marta Gentiloni Silveri, Giovanni Conforti, Alain Durmus
arXiv:2605. 00161v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) are an attractive alternative to autoregressive models because they promise sublinear-time, parallel generation, yet practical gains remain elusive as high-quality samples still demand hundreds of refinement steps.
By Hasan Amin, Yuan Gao, Yaser Souri, Subhojit Som, Ming Yin, Rajiv Khanna, Xia Song
arXiv:2602. 15008v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion models over discrete spaces have recently shown striking empirical success, yet their theoretical foundations remain incomplete.
By Daniil Dmitriev, Zhihan Huang, Yuting Wei
arXiv:2608. 02799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are typically formulated using continuous-time stochastic differential equations and measure-theoretic stochastic calculus.
By Sunder Ram Krishnan
arXiv:2607. 14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time with discrete state spaces and possibly arbitrary action spaces via a stochastic control approach, where the state dynamics are modeled as a controlled continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC).
By Zikun Zhang, Jiayuan Sheng, David D. Yao, Wenpin Tang
arXiv:2510. 22778v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a free-probabilistic framework for denoising diffusion, in which the data is a self-adjoint operator and its law a spectral distribution.
By Swagatam Das
The paper compares the parallelism capabilities of three diffusion large language model paradigms—masked, uniform, and Gaussian diffusion. It proves that uniform and Gaussian diffusion can sample with a number of forward passes scaling with the dual total correlation of the distribution, potentially much less than the context length, whereas masked diffusion may require more passes. The study establishes a provable separation in parallelism, showing that masked diffusion’s critical windows are asymptotically narrower than those of the other two approaches.
By Sitan Chen, Liye Wang
arXiv:2606. 08953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern generative models often define an entire probability path from a simple prior to the data law, rather than only an endpoint map.
By Lei Luo, Yingzhen Zhang, Jian Yang
arXiv:2410. 01244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a novel Wasserstein-1 ($W_1$) path-space divergence for stochastic and deterministic dynamics and establish a Wasserstein Uncertainty Propagation (WUP) theorem that bounds the $W_1$ distance between terminal distributions by the proposed divergence, equivalently characterized by a weighted $L^2$ discrepancy between the underlying drifts and the $W_1$ distance between their initial measures.
By Ziyu Chen, Markos A. Katsoulakis, Benjamin J. Zhang
arXiv:2606. 19894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations.
By Xinhe Mu, Zaijiu Shang, Zhaoqi Zhou, Chuan Zhou, Qi Meng, Guiying Yan, Zhiming Ma