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 Machine Learning
Sep 29

TeDiServe: High SLO Attainment Serving for Diffusion Language Models

TeDiServe is a cluster‑level serving system designed for diffusion language models (DLMs). It addresses DLM‑specific challenges such as the speed‑quality tradeoff from confidence‑based denoising, variable parallelization under fluctuating load, and non‑uniform per‑step costs from approximate KV caching. By employing deadline‑aware scheduling, adaptive load control, and a quality‑aware optimization for cluster reconfiguration, TeDiServe achieves up to 56.6 percentage points higher SLO attainment and reduces end‑to‑end latency by up to 46% with less than 1% accuracy loss.

By Tzu-Tao Chang, Benjamin Yuanyang Hong, Kiet Pham, Shivaram Venkataraman
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

BYOD: Build Your Own DLM - Efficient Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Language Model Conversion

The paper introduces BYOD (Build Your Own DLM), a LoRA‑only method that converts autoregressive language models into diffusion language models without changing the base architecture. BYOD successfully converts Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen2.5 7B, and Ministral 8B, adding adapters that occupy only 4.1‑5.8% of the total parameters while keeping all base‑model weights frozen. The conversions require at most 102.4 M tokens and a few hours on a single GPU, and the resulting diffusion models can generate from fully masked sequences, use bidirectional context, and retain much of the original model’s knowledge, with the Gemma conversion achieving the highest accuracy on a nine‑task benchmark.

By Ruurd J. A. Kuiper, Robert A. Bagheri