Introduces the first NPU accelerator for diffusion language models with dLLM-specific ISA, hardware execution model, BAOS KV quantization, and 7nm RTL synthesis.
super hub Canonical reference
Large Language Diffusion Models
Canonical reference. 72% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
186
Pith papers citing it
5
external citations · Pith
Background
72% of classified citations
abstract
The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are widely regarded as relying on autoregressive models (ARMs). We challenge this notion by introducing LLaDA, a diffusion model trained from scratch under the pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. LLaDA employs a forward data masking process and a reverse generation process, parameterized by a Transformer to predict masked tokens. It provides a principled generative approach for probabilistic inference by optimizing a likelihood lower bound. Across extensive benchmarks on general tasks, math, code, and so on, LLaDA demonstrates strong scalability and performs comparably to our self-constructed ARM baselines. Remarkably, LLaDA 8B is competitive with strong LLMs like LLaMA3 8B in in-context learning and, after SFT, exhibits impressive instruction-following abilities in case studies such as multi-turn dialogue. Moreover, LLaDA addresses the reversal curse, surpassing GPT-4o in a reversal poem completion task. Our findings show the promise of diffusion models for language modeling at scale and challenge the common assumption that core LLM capabilities discussed above inherently depend on ARMs. Project page and codes: https://ml-gsai.github.io/LLaDA-demo/.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 22
method 5
baseline 2
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- abstract The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are widely regarded as relying on autoregressive models (ARMs). We challenge this notion by introducing LLaDA, a diffusion model trained from scratch under the pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. LLaDA employs a forward data masking process and a reverse generation process, parameterized by a Transformer to predict masked tokens. It provides a principled generative approach for probabilistic inference by optimizing a likelihood lower bound. Across extensive benchmarks on general tasks, math, code, and so on, LLaDA demonstrate
authors
co-cited works
representative citing papers
Active lifting of data distributions via latent-sequence sampling and max-rate uncertainty reduction formally derives slow-thinking LLMs and places them on representation and sampler hierarchies that can be climbed.
The discrete diffusion NELBO equals data entropy plus an exact path KL to the oracle reverse process, and the denoiser, cavity, and score parameterizations are three interconvertible coordinates of the unique optimal reverse jump rate.
ART-RL learns adaptive diffusion sampling timesteps via continuous-time control and Gaussian actor–critic RL, improving and transferring over hand-designed grids at matched budgets.
Set diffusion factorizes likelihood over arbitrary token sets and uses a set-causal diffusion architecture to support KV caching and any-order decoding, yielding improved speed-quality tradeoffs versus prior diffusion LMs.
Flow models reach 99.2% Sudoku accuracy in 7 passes and 96.1% on out-of-distribution Sudoku-Extreme by selecting dynamically stable candidates and training with self-conditioning plus DPO to avoid failed outputs.
MLFMs combine masking with continuous flows to scale flow-based language models to reasoning and instruction-following tasks on GSM8K and MT-Bench.
Graph random walks provide a verifiable sandbox for diagnosing parallel samplers in masked diffusion models, showing performance depends on graph structure and introducing a new exact bisection sampler.
RNG-Bench evaluates MLLMs on hidden-observation reconstruction in non-Markov games, finds forgetting as the dominant error source, and shows fine-tuning on optimal rollouts improves performance with transfer to other benchmarks.
d-OPSD reframes on-policy self-distillation for dLLMs via suffix conditioning from self-generated answers and step-level supervision, outperforming RLVR and SFT on reasoning benchmarks with ~10% of the optimization steps.
TimeROME-DLM enables training-free knowledge editing in masked diffusion language models via temporal causal tracing and low-rank residual edit memory applied at inference time.
The paper introduces Uni-E, a unified energy for DLMs that accounts for model capacity, dependency and invariance, can be computed exactly, and corrects distribution shifts from dependency and invariance.
AsyncLane decouples refinement from advancement in DLM decoding via lane forking at delimiters plus efficiency optimizations, yielding up to 3x throughput gains on math and code benchmarks without retraining.
CaLIR learns continuous latent intent states guided by product category hierarchies for generative retrieval, combining hierarchical reasoning and dynamic prefix tries to balance effectiveness and low-latency inference on multilingual e-commerce data.
Locate-then-edit succeeds at the same early-to-mid MLP locations in masked diffusion models as in autoregressive models, but requires optimization over intermediate partial-mask states to handle multi-token targets.
MaskForge reaches 79.3% average attack success rate on five dLLMs by adaptively searching and accumulating structural attack patterns with a UCB bandit, improving 17.6% over baselines and transferring to 88.2% on AdvBench.
TAPS converts diffusion marginal probabilities into path-conditioned acceptance estimates to select prefix-closed subtrees under a fixed verification budget, achieving up to 7.9x end-to-end speedup over autoregressive decoding.
A policy network learns to choose unmasking order in masked diffusion by reweighting the loss, outperforming random and heuristic baselines on ordering-sensitive tasks.
BASTION is a budget-aware speculative decoding framework with adaptive tree-structured block diffusion drafting that reports up to 6.61x speedup and 39% improvement over block-diffusion baselines.
Mind-Omni unifies seven brain-vision-language tasks in one discrete-diffusion framework with a brain tokenizer and a new BQA dataset, claiming SOTA multi-task performance competitive with larger single-task models.
TUBE is a new upper bound on evidence for discrete diffusion models that shows block MDMs and AO-ARMs have strictly lower likelihood than exact ARMs.
Uniform diffusion models rely on a leave-one-out denoiser rather than the usual denoising posterior, with exact conversions derived; an absorbing-state reformulation is introduced that matches or exceeds masked diffusion on language modeling while preserving the original joint distribution.
TokenDrift refines discrete diffusion language models by applying anti-symmetric drifting to soft-token features during training, yielding large reductions in generation perplexity at low NFEs.
SHADOWMASK backdoors MDLMs by replacing the all-mask terminal distribution with a trigger-mask mixture prior, achieving near-100% attack success on DiT and LLaDA-8B models across multiple datasets while resisting fine-tuning and some defenses.
citing papers explorer
-
NPU Design for Diffusion Language Model Inference
Introduces the first NPU accelerator for diffusion language models with dLLM-specific ISA, hardware execution model, BAOS KV quantization, and 7nm RTL synthesis.
-
A First-Principles Theory of Slow Thinking and Active Perception
Active lifting of data distributions via latent-sequence sampling and max-rate uncertainty reduction formally derives slow-thinking LLMs and places them on representation and sampler hierarchies that can be climbed.
-
What Does a Discrete Diffusion Model Learn?
The discrete diffusion NELBO equals data entropy plus an exact path KL to the oracle reverse process, and the denoiser, cavity, and score parameterizations are three interconvertible coordinates of the unique optimal reverse jump rate.
-
ART for Diffusion Sampling: Continuous-Time Control and Actor-Critic Learning
ART-RL learns adaptive diffusion sampling timesteps via continuous-time control and Gaussian actor–critic RL, improving and transferring over hand-designed grids at matched budgets.
-
Set Diffusion: Interpolating Token Orderings Between Autoregression and Diffusion for Fast and Flexible Decoding
Set diffusion factorizes likelihood over arbitrary token sets and uses a set-causal diffusion architecture to support KV caching and any-order decoding, yielding improved speed-quality tradeoffs versus prior diffusion LMs.
-
Flow Reasoning Models: Scaling Reasoning Through Iterative Self-Refinement
Flow models reach 99.2% Sudoku accuracy in 7 passes and 96.1% on out-of-distribution Sudoku-Extreme by selecting dynamically stable candidates and training with self-conditioning plus DPO to avoid failed outputs.
-
Masked Language Flow Models
MLFMs combine masking with continuous flows to scale flow-based language models to reasoning and instruction-following tasks on GSM8K and MT-Bench.
-
Understanding Parallel Samplers in Masked Diffusion via Random Walks on Graphs
Graph random walks provide a verifiable sandbox for diagnosing parallel samplers in masked diffusion models, showing performance depends on graph structure and introducing a new exact bisection sampler.
-
Beyond the Current Observation: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Controllable Non-Markov Games
RNG-Bench evaluates MLLMs on hidden-observation reconstruction in non-Markov games, finds forgetting as the dominant error source, and shows fine-tuning on optimal rollouts improves performance with transfer to other benchmarks.
-
Learning from the Self-future: On-policy Self-distillation for dLLMs
d-OPSD reframes on-policy self-distillation for dLLMs via suffix conditioning from self-generated answers and step-level supervision, outperforming RLVR and SFT on reasoning benchmarks with ~10% of the optimization steps.
-
TimeROME-DLM: Temporal Causal Tracing and Low-Rank Inference-Time Knowledge Editing for Masked Diffusion Language Models
TimeROME-DLM enables training-free knowledge editing in masked diffusion language models via temporal causal tracing and low-rank residual edit memory applied at inference time.
-
Unified Energy for Invariant and Independent Decoding in Diffusion Language Models
The paper introduces Uni-E, a unified energy for DLMs that accounts for model capacity, dependency and invariance, can be computed exactly, and corrects distribution shifts from dependency and invariance.
-
AsyncLane: Decoupling Refinement from Advancement in Diffusion Language Model Decoding
AsyncLane decouples refinement from advancement in DLM decoding via lane forking at delimiters plus efficiency optimizations, yielding up to 3x throughput gains on math and code benchmarks without retraining.
-
Beyond Matching: Category-Guided Latent Intent Reasoning for Generative Retrieval in E-Commerce
CaLIR learns continuous latent intent states guided by product category hierarchies for generative retrieval, combining hierarchical reasoning and dynamic prefix tries to balance effectiveness and low-latency inference on multilingual e-commerce data.
-
Knowledge Editing in Masked Diffusion Language Models
Locate-then-edit succeeds at the same early-to-mid MLP locations in masked diffusion models as in autoregressive models, but requires optimization over intermediate partial-mask states to handle multi-token targets.
-
MaskForge: Structure-Aware Adaptive Attacks for Jailbreaking Diffusion Large Language Models
MaskForge reaches 79.3% average attack success rate on five dLLMs by adaptively searching and accumulating structural attack patterns with a UCB bandit, improving 17.6% over baselines and transferring to 88.2% on AdvBench.
-
TAPS: Target-Aware Prefix Tree Selection for Diffusion-Drafted Speculative Decoding
TAPS converts diffusion marginal probabilities into path-conditioned acceptance estimates to select prefix-closed subtrees under a fixed verification budget, achieving up to 7.9x end-to-end speedup over autoregressive decoding.
-
Adaptive Order Policies for Masked Diffusion
A policy network learns to choose unmasking order in masked diffusion by reweighting the loss, outperforming random and heuristic baselines on ordering-sensitive tasks.
-
Bastion: Budget-Aware Speculative Decoding with Tree-structured Block Diffusion Drafting
BASTION is a budget-aware speculative decoding framework with adaptive tree-structured block diffusion drafting that reports up to 6.61x speedup and 39% improvement over block-diffusion baselines.
-
Mind-Omni: A Unified Multi-Task Framework for Brain-Vision-Language Modeling via Discrete Diffusion
Mind-Omni unifies seven brain-vision-language tasks in one discrete-diffusion framework with a brain tokenizer and a new BQA dataset, claiming SOTA multi-task performance competitive with larger single-task models.
-
TUBE: Tangent Upper Bound on Evidence for Discrete Diffusion Language Models
TUBE is a new upper bound on evidence for discrete diffusion models that shows block MDMs and AO-ARMs have strictly lower likelihood than exact ARMs.
-
Uniform Diffusion Models Revisited: Leave-One-Out Denoiser and Absorbing State Reformulation
Uniform diffusion models rely on a leave-one-out denoiser rather than the usual denoising posterior, with exact conversions derived; an absorbing-state reformulation is introduced that matches or exceeds masked diffusion on language modeling while preserving the original joint distribution.
-
Drifting Objectives for Refining Discrete Diffusion Language Models
TokenDrift refines discrete diffusion language models by applying anti-symmetric drifting to soft-token features during training, yielding large reductions in generation perplexity at low NFEs.
-
Backdooring Masked Diffusion Language Models
SHADOWMASK backdoors MDLMs by replacing the all-mask terminal distribution with a trigger-mask mixture prior, achieving near-100% attack success on DiT and LLaDA-8B models across multiple datasets while resisting fine-tuning and some defenses.
-
Machine Unlearning for Masked Diffusion Language Models
MDU minimizes forward KL divergence from prompt-conditional to prompt-masked unconditional predictions at masked positions to unlearn knowledge in MDLMs while trading off privacy and utility via temperature scaling.
-
Constrained Code Generation with Discrete Diffusion
Constrained Diffusion for Code (CDC) integrates constraint satisfaction into the reverse denoising process of discrete diffusion models via constraint-aware operators that use optimization and program analysis to steer generation toward feasible programs.
-
Dynamic Chunking for Diffusion Language Models
DCDM replaces positional blocks with learnable semantic chunks via differentiable Chunking Attention, yielding consistent gains over block and unstructured diffusion baselines up to 1.5B parameters.
-
PSD: Pushing the Pareto Frontier of Diffusion LLMs via Parallel Speculative Decoding
PSD is a training-free framework that jointly optimizes spatial unmasking and temporal speculative decoding in diffusion LLMs to reach up to 5.5x tokens per forward pass while preserving accuracy comparable to greedy decoding.
-
From Table to Cell: Attention for Better Reasoning with TABALIGN
TABALIGN pairs a diffusion language model planner emitting binary cell masks with a trained attention verifier, raising average accuracy 15.76 points over strong baselines on eight table benchmarks while speeding execution 44.64%.
-
Factorization-Error-Free Discrete Diffusion Language Model via Speculative Decoding
FeF-DLLM achieves factorization-error-free generation in discrete diffusion language models via prefix-conditioned posterior factorization and speculative decoding, delivering 5.04 pp higher accuracy and 3.86x faster inference on GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and MBPP.
-
Support Before Frequency in Discrete Diffusion
Discrete diffusion models learn data support before frequencies because the exact reverse process decomposes edits into a dominant validity scale and a finer probability coefficient.
-
Beyond Mode-Seeking RL: Trajectory-Balance Post-Training for Diffusion Language Models
TraFL applies trajectory flow balancing to post-train diffusion language models, preventing mode collapse and delivering consistent gains on reasoning tasks that hold under increased sampling.
-
AIS: Adaptive Importance Sampling for Quantized RL
AIS adaptively corrects non-stationary policy gradient bias in quantized LLM RL, matching BF16 performance while retaining 1.5-2.76x FP8 rollout speedup.
-
Self-Distilled Trajectory-Aware Boltzmann Modeling: Bridging the Training-Inference Discrepancy in Diffusion Language Models
TABOM is a trajectory-aligned Boltzmann modeling framework that turns self-distilled inference paths into a pairwise ranking loss to close the training-inference gap in diffusion language models and expand their effective capabilities.
-
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.
-
UniRank: Unified List-wise Reranking via Confidence-Ordered Denoising
UniRank unifies autoregressive and non-autoregressive list-wise reranking via bidirectional modeling in a confidence-ordered iterative denoising process, outperforming baselines on datasets and online tests.
-
TAD: Temporal-Aware Trajectory Self-Distillation for Fast and Accurate Diffusion LLM
TAD improves the accuracy-parallelism trade-off in diffusion LLMs via temporal-aware self-distillation that applies hard labels to soon-to-be-decoded tokens and soft supervision to future tokens.
-
BadDLM: Backdooring Diffusion Language Models with Diverse Targets
BadDLM implants effective backdoors in diffusion language models across concept, attribute, alignment, and payload targets by exploiting denoising dynamics while preserving clean performance.
-
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.
-
LEAP: Unlocking dLLM Parallelism via Lookahead Early-Convergence Token Detection
LEAP detects early-converging tokens in dLLMs via future context filtering and multi-sequence superposition, reducing average denoising steps by about 30% while maintaining accuracy.
-
Guidance Is Not a Hyperparameter: Learning Dynamic Control in Diffusion Language Models
Adaptive guidance trajectories learned via PPO outperform fixed-scale CFG on controllability-quality balance in three controlled NLP generation tasks with discrete diffusion models.
-
GPO-V: Jailbreak Diffusion Vision Language Model by Global Probability Optimization
GPO-V jailbreaks dVLMs by globally optimizing probabilities in the denoising process to bypass refusal patterns, achieving stealthy and transferable attacks.
-
Focus on the Core: Empowering Diffusion Large Language Models by Self-Contrast
FoCore uses self-contrast on early-converging high-density tokens to boost diffusion LLM quality on reasoning benchmarks while cutting decoding steps by over 2x.
-
DARE: Diffusion Language Model Activation Reuse for Efficient Inference
DARE reuses up to 87% of attention activations in diffusion LLMs through KV caching and output reuse, delivering 1.2x per-layer latency gains with average performance drops of 1.2-2.0%.
-
Simple Self-Conditioning Adaptation for Masked Diffusion Models
SCMDM is a post-training self-conditioning adaptation for masked diffusion models that reduces generative perplexity by nearly 50% on OWT and improves performance on images, molecules, and genomics.
-
Dream-Cubed: Controllable Generative Modeling in Minecraft by Training on Billions of Cubes
Dream-Cubed releases a billion-scale voxel dataset and 3D diffusion models that generate controllable Minecraft worlds by operating directly on blocks.
-
NI Sampling: Accelerating Discrete Diffusion Sampling by Token Order Optimization
NI Sampling accelerates discrete diffusion language models up to 14.3 times by training a neural indicator to select which tokens to sample at each step using a trajectory-preserving objective.
-
One Pass for All: A Discrete Diffusion Model for Knowledge Graph Triple Set Prediction
DiffTSP applies discrete diffusion to knowledge graph triple set prediction, recovering all missing triples simultaneously via edge-masking noise reversal and a structure-aware transformer, achieving SOTA on three datasets.
-
DepCap: Adaptive Block-Wise Parallel Decoding for Efficient Diffusion LM Inference
DepCap accelerates diffusion LM inference up to 5.63x by using last-block influence for adaptive block boundaries and conflict-free token selection for parallel decoding, with negligible quality loss.
-
LangFlow: Continuous Diffusion Rivals Discrete in Language Modeling
LangFlow is the first continuous diffusion language model to rival discrete diffusion on perplexity and generative perplexity while exceeding autoregressive baselines on several zero-shot tasks.