arXiv AI

Data-Efficient Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Language Models via On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606. 06712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transformation of autoregressive models (ARLMs) into diffusion language models (DLMs).

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Mechanism Shift During Post-training from Autoregressive to Masked Diffusion Language Models

The study investigates how post‑training of large autoregressive language models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) affects their internal computation. Across two 7B ARM‑MDM families and four diagnostic tasks, the authors find that MDMs retain much of the ARM’s high‑attribution pathways on prefix‑dominant tasks, but reorganize computation toward earlier layers on globally constrained tasks. Component‑level probes reveal that ARMs depend on sharply specialized components, whereas MDMs show weaker specialization and more diffuse output‑space alignment.

By Injin Kong, Hyoungjoon Lee, Yohan Jo
arXiv AI
Jul 29

PreDiff-LM: Pretrained Discrete Masked Diffusion Language Modeling with Hybrid Attention

arXiv:2607. 25157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete masked diffusion language models support bidirectional generation and infilling, but adapting pretrained autoregressive (AR) transformers requires reconciling causal pretraining with bidirectional denoising.

By Zhengtao Yao, Runhao Li, Xupeng Chen, Jiayi Cheng, Chenqian Le, Michael Yue, Jesson Wang, Siheng Wang, Guang Yang, Haoyan Xu, Chenhao Wei, Zhengqing Yuan, Youran Shen, Yanfang Ye, Junhao Dong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces PILL, a new infilling technique for diffusion language models that eliminates the need for a preset initial length and reduces inference overhead. PILL uses probing-based length-free decoding, cutting down on extra forward passes and speeding up generation. Experiments across five diffusion models and eight benchmarks show PILL outperforms the strongest baseline with higher pass rates and BLEU-2 scores while running 1.82× faster.

By Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Yuchen Yan, Dongqi Fu, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
arXiv AI
Jul 7

dOPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2607. 04428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising a masked sequence, offering a parallel alternative to autoregressive models, but eliciting strong reasoning through post-training remains difficult: supervised fine-tuning is off-policy and suffers from exposure bias, while reinforcement learning gives only sparse, sequence-level rewards and is hard to apply without tractable sequence likelihoods.

By Phuong Tuan Dat, Qi Li, Xinchao Wang