arXiv Computation and Language By Amin Najafgholizadeh

Train the Sampler You Run: Few-Step Masked Diffusion Language Models via Mixture-Likelihood Fine-Tuning

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper introduces Mixture‑Likelihood Fine‑Tuning (Mix‑FT), a method that fine‑tunes a pretrained masked diffusion language model on an importance‑weighted bound of its own sampler’s likelihood, without altering the architecture or requiring a teacher. Experiments on LLaDA‑8B and a 110M‑parameter block diffusion model show that Mix‑FT outperforms continued cross‑entropy, Alpha diffusion, and SDTT distillation across various step counts, yielding higher‑quality continuations and better scores from multiple human judges.

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 Computation and Language.

arXiv AI
Oct 1

Distilling Diffusion Score Discrepancy for Efficient Training Data Attribution

The paper introduces a new method for training data attribution in diffusion models called TID, which uses a local score discrepancy measure and can be estimated without retraining. It further distills this approach into TIDE, a forward‑only student that reproduces the teacher’s rankings using internal activations, achieving comparable accuracy at dramatically lower query cost. Experiments on CIFAR‑10, ArtBench‑10, and MS‑COCO show that TID outperforms existing methods and TIDE attributes samples in milliseconds, faster than generation itself.

By Shixuan Liu, Joan Serr\`a, Kin Wai Cheuk, Jinju Kim, Woosung Choi, Yukara Ikemiya, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Jiaqi W. Ma, Yuki Mitsufuji
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Optimizers for Diffusion Models: A Controlled Benchmark

The paper introduces the first controlled benchmark for optimizers in discrete diffusion models, evaluating seven optimizers (AdamW, Lion, Muon, SOAP, MARS, MARS‑M, Schedule‑Free) across four diffusion formulations: masked diffusion on text8, uniform diffusion on QM9 and LM1B, and Gaussian diffusion on CelebA‑64. Each optimizer undergoes the same search protocol and is retrained with full budget and multiple seeds, revealing that AdamW, while strong, is not universally optimal and that optimizers validated on autoregressive language models (Muon, MARS‑M, SOAP) can outperform tuned AdamW on certain tasks.

By Arman Bolatov, Egor Shulgin, David Li, Abduragim Shtanchaev, Sebastian U. Stich, Maxim Panov, Eric Moulines, Peter Richt\'arik, Martin Tak\'a\v{c}