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.
132
Pith papers citing it
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
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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%.
-
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.
-
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.
-
DMax: Aggressive Parallel Decoding for dLLMs
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.
-
Demystifying MaskGIT Sampler and Beyond: Adaptive Order Selection in Masked Diffusion
Theoretical analysis reveals MaskGIT's implicit temperature sampling in masked diffusion; proposes equivalent moment sampler and efficiency techniques for adaptive unmasking with image and text experiments.
-
Inference-Time Scaling of Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Refinement
PG-DLM applies particle Gibbs sampling over full trajectories in diffusion language models to enable iterative refinement, yielding higher accuracy on reward-guided generation with theoretical convergence guarantees.
-
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.
-
Elastic-dLLM: Position Preserving Context Compression and Augmentation of Diffusion LLMs
Position-preserving MASK token compression reduces redundancy in diffusion LLMs to accelerate parallel decoding and enable context folding for longer sequences.
-
Discrete Stochastic Localization for Non-autoregressive Generation
DSL provides a continuous embedding framework where one denoiser supports a family of SNR paths for discrete sequences, improving MAUVE scores on OpenWebText and allowing random-order and hybrid sampling from a fine-tuned MDLM checkpoint.
-
Orthrus: Memory-Efficient Parallel Token Generation via Dual-View Diffusion
Orthrus unifies autoregressive LLMs and diffusion models via shared KV cache and consensus to enable up to 7.8x parallel token generation speedup with O(1) memory overhead and lossless results.
-
TrajDLM: Topology-Aware Block Diffusion Language Model for Trajectory Generation
TrajDLM applies block diffusion language models to discrete road-segment sequences with topology constraints to generate realistic trajectories up to 2.8 times faster than prior methods while supporting zero-shot transfer.
-
Coupling Models for One-Step Discrete Generation
Coupling Models enable single-step discrete sequence generation via learned couplings to Gaussian latents and outperform prior one-step baselines on text perplexity, biological FBD, and image FID metrics.
-
Dataset-Level Metrics Attenuate Non-Determinism: A Fine-Grained Non-Determinism Evaluation in Diffusion Language Models
Dataset-level metrics in diffusion language models mask substantial sample-level non-determinism that varies with model and system factors, which a new Factor Variance Attribution metric can decompose.
-
Diffusion Model for Manifold Data: Score Decomposition, Curvature, and Statistical Complexity
Diffusion models on manifold-supported data admit score decompositions whose statistical rates are controlled by intrinsic dimension and curvature.
-
Spectral Condition for $\mu$P under Width-Depth Scaling
A unified spectral condition for μP under width-depth scaling reveals a transition at k=1 vs k≥2 transformations per residual block and enables stable feature learning for practical architectures like Transformers.
-
ETS: Energy-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Training-Free RL Alignment
ETS performs training-free RL alignment for language models by energy-guided test-time scaling with Monte Carlo energy estimation and importance sampling acceleration.
-
ART for Diffusion Sampling: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Timestep Schedule
ART reparameterizes diffusion sampling time and uses RL to learn optimal timestep schedules that reduce discretization error and improve generation quality across budgets and datasets.
-
Reinforcement Learning with Discrete Diffusion Policies for Combinatorial Action Spaces
A method trains discrete diffusion policies for combinatorial RL by matching to a PMD-regularized target distribution, reporting SOTA performance and sample efficiency on DNA generation, macro-action, and multi-agent benchmarks.
-
Muddit: Liberating Generation Beyond Text-to-Image with a Unified Discrete Diffusion Model
Muddit is a unified discrete diffusion transformer that integrates strong visual priors from a pretrained text-to-image model with a lightweight text decoder to enable fast parallel generation across text and image modalities.
-
LLaDA-V: Large Language Diffusion Models with Visual Instruction Tuning
LLaDA-V is a diffusion-based multimodal large language model that reaches competitive or state-of-the-art results on visual instruction tasks while using a non-autoregressive architecture.
-
D-PACE: Dynamic Position-Aware Cross-Entropy for Parallel Speculative Drafting
D-PACE derives per-position weights from a surrogate of expected accepted draft length to shift training focus toward currently limiting positions, yielding measured gains in wall-clock speedup and emitted length across benchmarks.
-
Predict-then-Diffuse: Adaptive Response Length for Compute-Budgeted Inference in Diffusion LLMs
Predict-then-Diffuse predicts response length for diffusion LLMs before inference, cutting FLOPs with a data-driven safety buffer while preserving output quality.
-
The Serial Scaling Hypothesis
The serial scaling hypothesis formalizes inherently serial problems in complexity theory and demonstrates that diffusion models cannot solve them.
-
On the Quantization Robustness of Diffusion Language Models in Coding Benchmarks
Diffusion coding model CoDA shows smaller accuracy drops than Qwen3-1.7B under 2-4 bit quantization on HumanEval and MBPP.
-
Low-Rank Adaptation Redux for Large Models
An overview revisits LoRA variants by categorizing advances in architectural design, efficient optimization, and applications while linking them to classical signal processing tools for principled fine-tuning.
- Learned Relay Representations for Forward-Thinking Discrete Diffusion Models
- Backdooring Masked Diffusion Language Models
- Break the Block: Dynamic-size Reasoning Blocks for Diffusion Large Language Models via Monotonic Entropy Descent with Reinforcement Learning
- Towards A Generative Protein Evolution Machine with DPLM-Evo
- Consistent Diffusion Language Models
- Simple Self-Conditioning Adaptation for Masked Diffusion Models