arXiv Computation and Language

SpecCTMC: Exact Speculative Simulation of Diffusion Language Model Continuous-Time Markov Chains

SpecCTMC is a training‑free speculative sampler for masked diffusion language models that reduces the sequential bottleneck of exact continuous‑time sampling. It updates tokens successively using previously computed predictions, evaluates intermediate states in parallel, and applies an exact acceptance‑and‑correction step, thereby preserving the joint distribution of event times, generation order, and token values. Experiments on LLaDA‑8B‑Instruct and Dream‑v0‑Instruct‑7B show 1.73‑4.38× fewer sequential model evaluations while maintaining the reference sampling distribution.

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
Jul 22

AdaFlash: Adaptive Speculative Decoding via On-Policy Distilled Diffusion Drafters

arXiv:2607. 19223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding, in which a lightweight draft model first generates a draft sequence that is then verified in parallel by the target model, has become a prevalent paradigm for accelerating large language model inference.

By Yu-Yang Qian, Hao-Cong Wu, Chen Chen, Jiacheng Sun, Zhenhua Dong, Peng Zhao, Zhi-Hua Zhou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

AdaFlash: Adaptive Speculative Decoding via On-Policy Distilled Diffusion Drafters

Speculative decoding, in which a lightweight draft model first generates a draft sequence that is then verified in parallel by the target model, has become a prevalent paradigm for accelerating large language model inference. Recent work such as DFlash further boosts drafting efficiency by leveraging diffusion drafters, whose parallel denoising mechanism enables draft generation in a single forward pass.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Trajectory-Level Speculative Decoding for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces a trajectory-level speculative decoding framework for diffusion-based language models (dLLMs), addressing the limitation of existing strategies that revert to single-token generation when confidence is low. By constructing draft denoising trajectories through confidence-stratified tree exploration and verifying them with blockwise parallel evaluation and bidirectional attention masking, the method also incorporates inter-block speculation to exploit the models’ bidirectional structure. Experiments show a 30–40% reduction in denoising iterations, a token-per-step increase from 2.6 to 4.3, and a 7–14× speedup over vanilla dLLMs while maintaining accuracy within 1% on reasoning and code benchmarks.

By Tianxiang Pan, Baitao Gong, Mo Guang, Hongwei Yong, Tianpeng Jiang, Yaqian Li, Zheng Cao, Kaiwen Long
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
Jul 17

Token Time Continuous Diffusion for Language Modeling

arXiv:2607. 14106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we introduce token time continuous diffusion (TTCD), a new diffusion language model which (a) operates in continuous space, deterministically mapping Gaussian noise to a final token canvas with no further sampling, and crucially (b) incorporates a new notion of per-token times, with some tokens proceeding from noise to token at a faster rate than others.

By Parikshit Bansal, Sujay Sanghavi
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

TeCoP: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Model Decoding via Tentative Context Pipelining

TeCoP is a training‑free decoder that accelerates diffusion large language model (dLLM) decoding by decoupling prediction readiness from context utility. It uses tentative context pipelining and draft‑and‑verify to reuse stable but uncommitted predictions as provisional cross‑block context, with commitment based on confidence and stability checks. Across four dLLMs on GSM8K, Minerva MATH, and MBPP, TeCoP cuts forward evaluations by up to 87% and boosts throughput up to 7.5‑fold without KV caching and 11.77‑fold with caching, outperforming Fast‑dLLM and DSB while maintaining accuracy within one percentage point.

By Jui-Chien Tsou, Hsuan-Chi Liu, Wei-Chin Wang, Yu-Syuan Xu, Chun-Yi Lee
arXiv AI
Oct 27

Learning When to Commit: Schedule Distillation for Fast Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces dSpark, a schedule distillation framework that learns when to commit tokens in diffusion large language models to accelerate generation. By constructing unmasking schedules that prioritize revealing tokens which make other positions easier to predict, dSpark reduces uncertainty earlier in decoding. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks show significant speedups—10.12× on LLaDA‑8B‑Instruct and 5.12× on Dream‑7B‑Instruct—while preserving superior task performance.

By Aidar Myrzakhan, Zhiqiang Shen