arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Representation-based Masked Diffusion Model

The paper introduces Representation-based Masked Diffusion Model (RMDM), a new framework for language modeling that improves upon existing Masked Diffusion Models by incorporating global semantic guidance. RMDM encodes text into a continuous semantic space with a pretrained encoder, normalizes this representation to a Gaussian prior via an invertible transformation, and then trains a masked diffusion model conditioned on this latent representation to coordinate parallel token updates. Experiments show that RMDM yields higher generation quality, especially when using aggressive few‑step sampling.

By Yangrong Hu, Ding Huang, Xueyu Zhou, Jian Huang