arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Forward-Free Diffusion Language Models with BPTT-Free Looped Refinement

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

A Comparative analysis of Layer-wise Representational Capacity in AR and Diffusion LLMs

arXiv:2603. 07475v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) language models build representations incrementally via left-to-right prediction, while diffusion language models (dLLMs) are trained through full-sequence denoising.

By Raghavv Goel, Risheek Garrepalli, Sudhanshu Agrawal, Chris Lott, Mingu Lee, Fatih Porikli