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Unified Multimodal Discrete Diffusion

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arxiv 2503.20853 v1 pith:5QW57EG2 submitted 2025-03-26 cs.CV cs.AIcs.LGcs.RO

classification cs.CVcs.AIcs.LGcs.RO
keywords modelsmultimodaltextdiffusiondiscretegenerationimageunidisc
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Multimodal generative models that can understand and generate across multiple modalities are dominated by autoregressive (AR) approaches, which process tokens sequentially from left to right, or top to bottom. These models jointly handle images, text, video, and audio for various tasks such as image captioning, question answering, and image generation. In this work, we explore discrete diffusion models as a unified generative formulation in the joint text and image domain, building upon their recent success in text generation. Discrete diffusion models offer several advantages over AR models, including improved control over quality versus diversity of generated samples, the ability to perform joint multimodal inpainting (across both text and image domains), and greater controllability in generation through guidance. Leveraging these benefits, we present the first Unified Multimodal Discrete Diffusion (UniDisc) model which is capable of jointly understanding and generating text and images for a variety of downstream tasks. We compare UniDisc to multimodal AR models, performing a scaling analysis and demonstrating that UniDisc outperforms them in terms of both performance and inference-time compute, enhanced controllability, editability, inpainting, and flexible trade-off between inference time and generation quality. Code and additional visualizations are available at https://unidisc.github.io.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Over infinite domains, hierarchy-uniform domain generalization is impossible for every nontrivial hypothesis class; a length-generalization bound is a property of the length hierarchy, not a hierarchy-free guarantee.

  2. Any-Order Flexible Length Masked Diffusion

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    FlexMDM is a discrete diffusion model that provably supports any-order generation over variable-length sequences by learning an insertion expectation alongside the unmasking posterior, validated by length-fidelity, ma...

  3. Mask-Aware Policy Gradients for Diffusion Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Optimizing both token predictions and unmasking-position probabilities in MDLM policy gradients improves RL fine-tuning, reaching 87.1% GSM8K and 53.4% MBPP.

  4. Discrete Diffusion Models: A Unified Framework from Tokenization to Generation

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    Discrete diffusion models are re-framed as instances of a tokenization-centric, four-component design space (corruption, denoiser, objective, sampler) in a broad survey with no new experimental or theoretical results.

  5. A Survey on Diffusion Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 3.0 of 10

    A comprehensive survey of diffusion language models covering taxonomy, training and inference techniques, and comparisons with autoregressive models.

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