arXiv Machine Learning By Shuchen Xue, Tianyu Xie, Tianyang Hu, Zijin Feng, Jiacheng Sun, Kenji Kawaguchi, Zhenguo Li, Zhi-Ming Ma

Any-Order GPT as Masked Diffusion Model: Decoupling Formulation and Architecture

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces Any-Order GPT, a Masked Diffusion Model (MDM) that operates within a decoder‑only architecture, allowing a fair comparison with traditional autoregressive (AR) models. By decoupling algorithmic choices from architectural differences, the study demonstrates that decoder‑only MDMs can achieve up to 25× faster inference while maintaining comparable perplexity, especially when using temperature annealing. The work offers insights into building more computationally efficient foundation models by separating core modeling decisions from architectural influences.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

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
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 6

Esoteric Language Models: A Family of Any-Order Diffusion LLMs

arXiv:2506. 01928v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation.

By Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Zhihan Yang, Yash Akhauri, Johnna Liu, Deepansha Singh, Zhoujun Cheng, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, John Thickstun, Arash Vahdat
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Ripple-Pivot Search: Active Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Large Language Models

Ripple-Pivot Search (RPS) is a training‑free decoding method for Diffusion Large Language Models that identifies mid‑entropy pivot positions to reduce uncertainty across remaining masked tokens. By proactively committing these pivots and evaluating token assignments via lookahead, RPS enables more tokens to be unmasked in parallel, speeding up decoding. Experiments on three dLLMs and four reasoning/code‑generation benchmarks show 4–10× wall‑clock speedup over standard decoding, up to 18× with KV caching, while maintaining or improving generation quality.

By Yushi Ye, Xu Chen, Haoyun Jiang, Jinsong Lan, Haihong Tang, Xiangtao Li, Mingming Gong, Ivor Tsang, Yanfeng Wang, Jiangchao Yao