Derives an exact unbiased policy gradient for RL post-training of diffusion LLMs via entropy-guided step selection and one-step denoising rewards, achieving state-of-the-art results on coding and logical reasoning benchmarks.
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MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models
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abstract
We introduce MMaDA, a novel class of multimodal diffusion foundation models designed to achieve superior performance across diverse domains such as textual reasoning, multimodal understanding, and text-to-image generation. The approach is distinguished by three key innovations: (i) MMaDA adopts a unified diffusion architecture with a shared probabilistic formulation and a modality-agnostic design, eliminating the need for modality-specific components. This architecture ensures seamless integration and processing across different data types. (ii) We implement a mixed long chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning strategy that curates a unified CoT format across modalities. By aligning reasoning processes between textual and visual domains, this strategy facilitates cold-start training for the final reinforcement learning (RL) stage, thereby enhancing the model's ability to handle complex tasks from the outset. (iii) We propose UniGRPO, a unified policy-gradient-based RL algorithm specifically tailored for diffusion foundation models. Utilizing diversified reward modeling, UniGRPO unifies post-training across both reasoning and generation tasks, ensuring consistent performance improvements. Experimental results demonstrate that MMaDA-8B exhibits strong generalization capabilities as a unified multimodal foundation model. It surpasses powerful models like LLaMA-3-7B and Qwen2-7B in textual reasoning, outperforms Show-o and SEED-X in multimodal understanding, and excels over SDXL and Janus in text-to-image generation. These achievements highlight MMaDA's effectiveness in bridging the gap between pretraining and post-training within unified diffusion architectures, providing a comprehensive framework for future research and development. We open-source our code and trained models at: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/MMaDA
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representative citing papers
Introduces Block-R1 benchmark, Block-R1-41K dataset, and a conflict score to handle domain-specific optimal block sizes in RL post-training of diffusion LLMs.
UniPath adaptively models coordination-path diversity in unified multimodal models by training a path-conditioned executor and using a lightweight planner for input-dependent selection, improving performance over fixed strategies.
RSPO interprets reward advantages as targets for relative log-ratios in dLLMs, calibrating noisy estimates to stabilize RLVR training and achieve strong gains on planning tasks with competitive math reasoning performance.
ΔLPS is a gradient-guided discrete posterior sampler for inverse problems that works with masked or uniform discrete diffusion priors and outperforms prior discrete methods on image restoration tasks.
BARD bridges autoregressive and diffusion VLMs with progressive block merging plus stage-wise intra-diffusion distillation, delivering 3x speedup and new SOTA on open dVLMs using under 4.4M data points.
DMax uses On-Policy Uniform Training and Soft Parallel Decoding to enable aggressive parallelism in dLLMs, raising TPF on GSM8K from 2.04 to 5.47 and on MBPP from 2.71 to 5.86 while preserving accuracy.
Info-Gain Sampler improves MDM decoding by using bidirectional information gain to reduce cumulative uncertainty, outperforming greedy samplers on reasoning accuracy and creative writing tasks.
dMLLM-TTS delivers up to 6x more efficient test-time scaling for diffusion MLLMs via O(N+T) hierarchical search and self-verified feedback, improving generation quality on GenEval across three models.
Derives exact guidance transition rates for discrete flow matching models that require only one model evaluation per sampling step and unify prior approximation-based methods.
A masked discrete diffusion model adds token editing at inference and grouped cross-entropy training to reach 0.90 GenEval, 86.9 DPG, and 10.76 HPSv3 scores.
SimSD adds a masking strategy to enable speculative decoding in diffusion LLMs, delivering up to 7.46x throughput gains on SDAR models while preserving generation quality.
Lumos-Nexus is a training-efficient video generation framework using two-stage alignment of a lightweight model followed by progressive frequency bridging to a high-fidelity generator in homogeneous latent space, plus the new VR-Bench for reasoning evaluation.
dMoE aggregates token expert distributions to block level in dLLMs, cutting unique experts from 69.5 to 14.6, memory by 76-80%, and latency by 1.14-1.66x while retaining 99.11% performance.
GDSD reduces RL for dLLMs to likelihood-free self-distillation via a normalization-free logit-matching objective, outperforming ELBO methods with more stable training on LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B.
GCPO performs per-token credit assignment in discrete policy optimization by setting token advantages proportional to the difference in model predictions under positive versus negative prompts, outperforming GRPO and DAPO on text-to-image and chain-of-thought tasks.
VRCD prioritizes visually complementary positions during parallel decoding in dMLLMs by measuring attention overlap with the new Visual Redundancy Index, yielding accuracy gains over confidence-based baselines on M^3CoT and MMBench.
Fast-dDrive is a block-diffusion VLA that reports SOTA accuracy on WOD-E2E and nuScenes driving benchmarks together with 12x throughput over autoregressive baselines via section scaffolds and test-time averaging.
Diffusion LLMs can act as their own efficiency teachers by using revokable parallel decoding to identify reliable token orders and then distilling those orders into the model parameters for faster inference.
Manta-LM approximates the HJB equation via flow matching in latent control space to realize closed-loop optimal control for language generation.
b1 is a plug-and-play post-training framework that trains diffusion LLMs to produce dynamic-size reasoning blocks by optimizing a monotonic entropy descent objective via reinforcement learning.
NoiseRater meta-learns instance-level importance scores for noise in diffusion training via bilevel optimization, then uses a two-stage pipeline to improve efficiency and generation quality on FFHQ and ImageNet.
Auditing five frontier VLMs reveals severe grounding failures (max 0.23 IoU, 19.1% Acc@0.5) and format collapse (up to 99% parse failure) in medical VQA; fine-tuning yields 85.5% SLAKE recall but perception remains the primary trustworthiness issue.
Tuna-2 shows that direct pixel embeddings can replace vision encoders in unified multimodal models, achieving competitive generation and stronger understanding at scale.
citing papers explorer
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Derives an exact unbiased policy gradient for RL post-training of diffusion LLMs via entropy-guided step selection and one-step denoising rewards, achieving state-of-the-art results on coding and logical reasoning benchmarks.
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Block-R1: Rethinking the Role of Block Size in Multi-domain Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Large Language Models
Introduces Block-R1 benchmark, Block-R1-41K dataset, and a conflict score to handle domain-specific optimal block sizes in RL post-training of diffusion LLMs.
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UniPath: Adaptive Coordination of Understanding and Generation for Unified Multimodal Reasoning
UniPath adaptively models coordination-path diversity in unified multimodal models by training a path-conditioned executor and using a lightweight planner for input-dependent selection, improving performance over fixed strategies.
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Relative Score Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models
RSPO interprets reward advantages as targets for relative log-ratios in dLLMs, calibrating noisy estimates to stabilize RLVR training and achieve strong gains on planning tasks with competitive math reasoning performance.
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Discrete Langevin-Inspired Posterior Sampling
ΔLPS is a gradient-guided discrete posterior sampler for inverse problems that works with masked or uniform discrete diffusion priors and outperforms prior discrete methods on image restoration tasks.
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BARD: Bridging AutoRegressive and Diffusion Vision-Language Models Via Highly Efficient Progressive Block Merging and Stage-Wise Distillation
BARD bridges autoregressive and diffusion VLMs with progressive block merging plus stage-wise intra-diffusion distillation, delivering 3x speedup and new SOTA on open dVLMs using under 4.4M data points.
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Improving Sampling for Masked Diffusion Models via Information Gain
Info-Gain Sampler improves MDM decoding by using bidirectional information gain to reduce cumulative uncertainty, outperforming greedy samplers on reasoning accuracy and creative writing tasks.
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Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion-Image: Advancing Masked Discrete Diffusion for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
A masked discrete diffusion model adds token editing at inference and grouped cross-entropy training to reach 0.90 GenEval, 86.9 DPG, and 10.76 HPSv3 scores.
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SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models
SimSD adds a masking strategy to enable speculative decoding in diffusion LLMs, delivering up to 7.46x throughput gains on SDAR models while preserving generation quality.
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Lumos-Nexus: Efficient Frequency Bridging with Homogeneous Latent Space for Video Unified Models
Lumos-Nexus is a training-efficient video generation framework using two-stage alignment of a lightweight model followed by progressive frequency bridging to a high-fidelity generator in homogeneous latent space, plus the new VR-Bench for reasoning evaluation.
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dMoE: dLLMs with Learnable Block Experts
dMoE aggregates token expert distributions to block level in dLLMs, cutting unique experts from 69.5 to 14.6, memory by 76-80%, and latency by 1.14-1.66x while retaining 99.11% performance.
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GDSD: Reinforcement Learning as Guided Denoiser Self-Distillation for Diffusion Language Models
GDSD reduces RL for dLLMs to likelihood-free self-distillation via a normalization-free logit-matching objective, outperforming ELBO methods with more stable training on LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B.
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Guidance Contrastive Token Credit Assignment for Discrete Policy Optimization
GCPO performs per-token credit assignment in discrete policy optimization by setting token advantages proportional to the difference in model predictions under positive versus negative prompts, outperforming GRPO and DAPO on text-to-image and chain-of-thought tasks.
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Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Parallel Decoding for Diffusion-Based Multimodal Large Language Models
VRCD prioritizes visually complementary positions during parallel decoding in dMLLMs by measuring attention overlap with the new Visual Redundancy Index, yielding accuracy gains over confidence-based baselines on M^3CoT and MMBench.
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Fast-dDrive: Efficient Block-Diffusion VLM for Autonomous Driving
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Roll Out and Roll Back: Diffusion LLMs are Their Own Efficiency Teachers
Diffusion LLMs can act as their own efficiency teachers by using revokable parallel decoding to identify reliable token orders and then distilling those orders into the model parameters for faster inference.
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Language Generation as Optimal Control: Closed-Loop Diffusion in Latent Control Space
Manta-LM approximates the HJB equation via flow matching in latent control space to realize closed-loop optimal control for language generation.
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Break the Block: Dynamic-size Reasoning Blocks for Diffusion Large Language Models via Monotonic Entropy Descent with Reinforcement Learning
b1 is a plug-and-play post-training framework that trains diffusion LLMs to produce dynamic-size reasoning blocks by optimizing a monotonic entropy descent objective via reinforcement learning.
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NoiseRater: Meta-Learned Noise Valuation for Diffusion Model Training
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Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
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dWorldEval: Scalable Robotic Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Model
A discrete diffusion model tokenizes multimodal robotic data and uses a progress token to predict future states and task completion for scalable policy evaluation.
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Stability-Weighted Decoding for Diffusion Language Models
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TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training
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Thinking Diffusion: Penalize and Guide Visual-Grounded Reasoning in Diffusion Multimodal Language Models
Position and step penalty plus visual reasoning guidance fix premature answering and weak visual grounding in diffusion MLLMs, delivering up to 7.5% accuracy gains and over 3x speedup.
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Efficient-DLM: From Autoregressive to Diffusion Language Models, and Beyond in Speed
Efficient-DLM converts AR models to dLMs via block-wise causal attention and position-dependent masking, yielding higher accuracy and 2.7-4.5x throughput than Dream 7B and Qwen3 4B.
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GIFT: Guided Importance-Aware Fine-Tuning for Diffusion Language Models
GIFT weights tokens by entropy during fine-tuning of diffusion language models and reports better performance than standard SFT on reasoning benchmarks across multiple settings.
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Bridging Video Understanding and Generation in a Unified Framework
Vega unifies video understanding and generation via shared vocabulary and hybrid autoregressive-diffusion architecture, reporting strong results on VBench and VideoMME.
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UniGenDet: A Unified Generative-Discriminative Framework for Co-Evolutionary Image Generation and Generated Image Detection
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Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model
Motus unifies understanding, video generation, and action in one latent world model via MoT experts and optical-flow latent actions, reporting gains over prior methods in simulation and real robots.
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Illuminating Unified Multimodal Model for Free-form Interleaved Text-Image Generation
ILLUME-X is a unified multimodal model that generates free-form interleaved text-image sequences via an expanded data pipeline, progressive self-adaptive training, and ILScore evaluation, claiming outperformance over prior unified models on style transfer, image decomposition, and storytelling.
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Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Models
Show-o2 unifies text, image, and video understanding and generation in a single autoregressive-plus-flow-matching model built on 3D causal VAE representations.