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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Masked Diffusion Vision-Language Models for Temporal Action Localization
Adapts MDVLMs to TAL via planned training objective and step-level IoU reward, reporting gains over autoregressive baselines on ActivityNet and THUMOS datasets.
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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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Tweedie's Formulae and Diffusion Generative Models Beyond Gaussian
Extends Tweedie's formulae to GBM, BESQ, and CIR processes to enable non-Gaussian diffusion generative models and empirical Bayes applications.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Training-free, Perceptually Consistent Low-Resolution Previews with High-Resolution Image for Efficient Workflows of Diffusion Models
A commutator-zero condition enables training-free generation of perceptually consistent low-resolution previews for high-resolution diffusion model outputs, achieving up to 33% computation reduction.
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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.
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Forget BIT, It is All about TOKEN: Towards Semantic Information Theory for LLMs
Proposes a semantic information theory for LLMs that substitutes the token for the bit as the atomic carrier of meaning, recasts the Transformer as an energy-based model, and derives directed rate-distortion and rate-reward functions using Massey's directed information.
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The Serial Scaling Hypothesis
The serial scaling hypothesis formalizes inherently serial problems in complexity theory and demonstrates that diffusion models cannot solve them.
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Decoding Strategies for Diffusion-Based ASR: A Systematic Evaluation of Confidence-Based Thresholding
Threshold-based decoding for diffusion ASR outperforms fixed schemes by accepting high-confidence tokens early and matches autoregressive accuracy with better speed.
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Beyond Execution: Static-Analysis Rewards and Hint-Conditioned Diffusion RL for Code Generation
Static checking rewards and moderate AST-based hints improve diffusion RL performance for code generation, with effectiveness varying by task difficulty across HumanEval, MBPP, and LiveCodeBench.
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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.
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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.
- Fast-dDrive: Efficient Block-Diffusion VLM for Autonomous Driving
- Learned Relay Representations for Forward-Thinking Discrete Diffusion Models
- Backdooring Masked Diffusion Language Models
- SURGE: Approximation and Training Free Particle Filter for Diffusion Surrogate
- Language Generation as Optimal Control: Closed-Loop Diffusion in Latent Control Space
- Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models
- DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing
- DiffRetriever: Parallel Representative Tokens for Retrieval with 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
- $R^2$-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models via Spatio-Temporal Redundancy Reduction
- OpenWorldLib: A Unified Codebase and Definition of Advanced World Models
- Diffusion-Inspired Masked Fine-Tuning for Knowledge Injection in Autoregressive LLMs