arXiv:2602. 19066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently achieved strong results in text generation.
By David Li, Nikita Gushchin, Dmitry Abulkhanov, Eric Moulines, Ivan Oseledets, Maxim Panov, Alexander Korotin
Forward-Free Diffusion Language Models with BPTT-Free Looped Refinement (FReDA) removes the need for a hand‑designed forward process in diffusion language modeling by treating model‑generated drafts as implicit intermediate states and refining them recursively. The approach detaches earlier refinement passes, backpropagating only through the final pass, and supports both self‑refinement and Best‑of‑N candidate selection. In sub‑8B experiments, FReDA‑4B surpasses larger diffusion baselines on reasoning and coding tasks, achieving up to 15% absolute gains and a 1.5‑1.8× speedup while scaling well with additional refinement steps.
By Haotian Sun, Rushi Qiang, Yuqian Zheng, Bo Dai
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.
By Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Kaiwen Zheng, Anru R. Zhang
The paper introduces Sigma, a large-scale continuous diffusion language model (3B/8B parameters) that uses steerable, low-dimensional ODE/SDE latent trajectories to address the non-smoothness of discrete diffusion models. Sigma is trained blockwise via likelihood optimization, jointly denoises Gaussian-corrupted token embeddings, and learns an optimal embedding geometry, leveraging pre-trained autoregressive weights for faster training. During inference, classifier-free guidance and score temperature are identified as essential for high-fidelity reasoning and coding, and Sigma matches or exceeds discrete models on benchmarks such as GSM8K, Minerva, HumanEval, MBPP, MATH-500, and AIME, while also revealing unique structural benefits like embedding-space steering and graceful degradation for low NFEs.
By Zhihan Yang, Wei Guo, Jean-Marie Lemercier, Simon Welker, Yonggan Fu, Mohammad Mahdi Kamani, Sajad Norouzi, Julius Berner, Tomas Geffner, Karsten Kreis, Yongxin Chen, Molei Tao, John Thickstun, Pavlo Molchanov, Ante Juki\'c, Arash Vahdat, Morteza Mardani
arXiv:2606. 01024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete Masked diffusion language models generate text by iterative parallel decoding, but few-step decoding suffers from a tradeoff between length and quality: with a fixed step budget, standard methods can generate a short, high-quality output, or they can produce long but repetitive text.
By Longxuan Yu, Yunshu Wu, Yu Fu, Siheng Xiong, Rob Brekelmans, Hui Liu, Yue Dong, Greg Ver Steeg
arXiv:2609.38364v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Discrete diffusion models and flow matching have emerged as powerful frameworks for generative modeling over discrete state spaces, yet efficient few...
By Yidong Ouyang, Zhengyan Wan, Themis Haris, Tian Tan, Liqian Peng, Henry Li, Ziqian Lin, Jianhang Chen, Maryam Karimzadehgan, Alec Go, George Michailidis