Introduces the first NPU accelerator for diffusion language models with dLLM-specific ISA, hardware execution model, BAOS KV quantization, and 7nm RTL synthesis.
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Large Language Diffusion Models
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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/.
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- 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
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representative citing papers
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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 adaptively corrects non-stationary policy gradient bias in quantized LLM RL, matching BF16 performance while retaining 1.5-2.76x FP8 rollout speedup.
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.
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 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 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 implants effective backdoors in diffusion language models across concept, attribute, alignment, and payload targets by exploiting denoising dynamics while preserving clean 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.
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.
citing papers explorer
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Unlocking Prompt Infilling Capability for Diffusion Language Models
Full-sequence masking in SFT unlocks prompt infilling for masked diffusion language models, producing templates that match or surpass hand-designed ones and transfer across models.
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Dependency-Guided Parallel Decoding in Discrete Diffusion Language Models
DEMASK adds a lightweight pairwise-dependency predictor to dLLMs and uses greedy selection to enable parallel unmasking whose total-variation error is provably bounded under sub-additivity.
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LogicDiff: Logic-Guided Denoising Improves Zero-Shot Reasoning in Masked Diffusion Language Models
Logic-role-guided unmasking in masked diffusion models raises zero-shot GSM8K accuracy from 22% to 61% by enforcing logical generation order.
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A Comparative analysis of Layer-wise Representational Capacity in AR and Diffusion LLMs
Diffusion language models form more global representations with early-layer redundancy compared to autoregressive models, allowing layer skipping for up to 18.75% FLOP savings while maintaining over 90% performance.
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NAVIRA: Decoupled Stochastic Remasking for Masked Diffusion Language Models
NAVIRA decouples quality scoring from regeneration via stochastic remasking in masked diffusion LMs, improving fluency and LLM-judge scores on a 170M model.
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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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Efficient Diffusion LLMs via Temporal-Spatial Parallel Decoding and Confidence Extrapolation
Introduces TSPD with a trajectory-feature controller and training-free CE to reduce denoising steps in dLLMs while aiming to preserve quality.
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PulseCol: Periodically Refreshed Column-Sparse Attention for Accelerating Diffusion Language Models
PulseCol introduces periodically refreshed column-sparse attention to achieve up to 1.95x speedup over FlashAttention in diffusion LLMs with maintained model quality.
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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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BitLM: Unlocking Multi-Token Language Generation with Bitwise Continuous Diffusion
BitLM replaces per-token softmax with bitwise continuous diffusion inside causal blocks to generate multiple tokens in parallel while preserving autoregressive structure.
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Edit-Based Refinement for Parallel Masked Diffusion Language Models
ME-DLM augments parallel masked diffusion models with edit-distance-supervised refinements to raise quality on coding and math benchmarks while using far fewer diffusion steps.
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TextLDM: Language Modeling with Continuous Latent Diffusion
TextLDM applies DiT-style latent diffusion with flow matching to language modeling via a REPA-aligned VAE, outperforming prior diffusion LMs and matching GPT-2 when trained from scratch on OpenWebText2.
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Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model
Cola DLM proposes a hierarchical latent diffusion model that learns a text-to-latent mapping, fits a global semantic prior in continuous space with a block-causal DiT, and performs conditional decoding, establishing latent prior modeling as an alternative to token-level autoregressive language model
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A Universal Avoidance Method for Diverse Multi-branch Generation
UAG is a universal avoidance generation method that increases multi-branch diversity in diffusion and transformer models by penalizing output similarity, delivering up to 1.9x higher diversity with 4.4x speed and 1/64th the FLOPs of prior methods.
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Stability-Weighted Decoding for Diffusion Language Models
Stability-Weighted Decoding improves diffusion LLM accuracy by modulating token scores with temporal stability from KL divergence between prediction steps.
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Differences in Text Generated by Diffusion and Autoregressive Language Models
DLMs exhibit lower n-gram entropy, higher semantic coherence, and higher semantic diversity than ARMs, primarily due to bidirectional context and remasking decoding strategies.
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The Illusion of Latent Generalization: Bi-directionality and the Reversal Curse
Bidirectional objectives mitigate reversal by requiring explicit source-as-target signals and storing directions as distinct representations instead of inducing latent generalization.
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Flow Map Language Models: One-step Language Modeling via Continuous Denoising
Continuous flows on token embeddings with flow-map distillation produce one-step language models whose quality exceeds recent 8-step discrete diffusion baselines on LM1B and OpenWebText.
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Diffusion-State Policy Optimization for Masked Diffusion Language Models
DiSPO optimizes intermediate decisions in masked diffusion LMs by branching at selected masked states, resampling tokens, scoring completions, and updating only new tokens using a derived policy-gradient estimator that reuses terminal rollouts.
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Training-Trajectory-Aware Token Selection
Training-Trajectory-Aware Token Selection (T3S) reconstructs the token-level training objective to overcome a performance bottleneck in continual distillation of reasoning capabilities from large to small language models.
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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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FS-DFM: Fast and Accurate Long Text Generation with Few-Step Diffusion Language Models
FS-DFM enables 1024-token generation at perplexity parity with 1024-step baselines using only 8 steps via explicit step-budget training, reliable updates, and teacher guidance.
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Diffusion Language Models Know the Answer Before Decoding
DLMs show early answer convergence allowing Prophet to cut decoding steps by up to 3.4x on LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B while keeping output quality.
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Seed Diffusion: A Large-Scale Diffusion Language Model with High-Speed Inference
Seed Diffusion Preview is a discrete diffusion language model that reaches 2146 tokens per second inference on H20 GPUs with competitive code benchmark performance, establishing a new speed-quality Pareto frontier.
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WaveFilter: Enhancing the Long-Context Capability of Diffusion LLMs via Wavelet-Guided KV Cache Filtering
WaveFilter applies wavelet decomposition to filter critical tokens for sparse KV caching, improving long-context performance of diffusion LLMs as a plug-and-play addition to existing methods.
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Dynamic-dLLM: Dynamic Cache-Budget and Adaptive Parallel Decoding for Training-Free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM
Dynamic-dLLM achieves over 3x average inference speedup on dLLMs like LLaDA-8B via adaptive cache budgets and decoding thresholds while preserving benchmark performance.
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TIDE: Efficient and Lossless MoE Diffusion LLM Inference with I/O-aware Expert Offload
TIDE schedules I/O-aware expert offloading for MoE diffusion LLMs by solving for an optimal refresh interval that exploits temporal stability of activations, yielding up to 1.5x throughput gain losslessly.
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Chainwash: Multi-Step Rewriting Attacks on Diffusion Language Model Watermarks
Chained rewrites by open-weight LLMs reduce watermark detection on diffusion LM outputs from 87.9% to 4.86% after five steps across multiple styles and models.
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Scaling Properties of Continuous Diffusion Spoken Language Models
Continuous diffusion spoken language models follow scaling laws for loss and phoneme divergence and generate emotive multi-speaker speech at 16B scale, though long-form coherence stays difficult.
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DALM: A Domain-Algebraic Language Model via Three-Phase Structured Generation
DALM is a proposed language model architecture that enforces algebraic constraints via a three-phase process over domain lattices to prevent cross-domain knowledge contamination during generation.
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Breaking Block Boundaries: Anchor-based History-stable Decoding for Diffusion Large Language Models
AHD uses real-time stability monitoring with dynamic anchors to allow early cross-block decoding of converged tokens, cutting steps by up to 80% and raising performance on benchmarks like BBH.
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FastDiSS: Few-step Match Many-step Diffusion Language Model on Sequence-to-Sequence Generation--Full Version
A training framework perturbs self-conditioning signals in diffusion language models to match few-step inference noise, enabling up to 400x faster sampling while surpassing standard continuous diffusion performance on sequence-to-sequence tasks.
- Fast-dDrive: Efficient Block-Diffusion VLM for Autonomous Driving
- Language Generation as Optimal Control: Closed-Loop Diffusion in Latent Control Space
- $R^2$-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models via Spatio-Temporal Redundancy Reduction
- Diffusion-Inspired Masked Fine-Tuning for Knowledge Injection in Autoregressive LLMs