A Survey on Diffusion Language Models
read the original abstract
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm. By generating tokens in parallel through an iterative denoising process, DLMs possess inherent advantages in reducing inference latency and capturing bidirectional context, thereby enabling fine-grained control over the generation process. While achieving a several-fold speed-up, recent advancements have allowed DLMs to show performance comparable to their autoregressive counterparts, making them a compelling choice for various natural language processing tasks. In this survey, we provide a holistic overview of the current DLM landscape. We trace its evolution and relationship with other paradigms, such as autoregressive and masked language models, and cover both foundational principles and state-of-the-art models. Our work offers an up-to-date, comprehensive taxonomy and an in-depth analysis of current techniques, from pre-training strategies to advanced post-training methods. Another contribution of this survey is a thorough review of DLM inference strategies and optimizations, including improvements in decoding parallelism, caching mechanisms, and generation quality. We also highlight the latest approaches to multimodal extensions of DLMs and delineate their applications across various practical scenarios. Furthermore, our discussion addresses the limitations and challenges of DLMs, including efficiency, long-sequence handling, and infrastructure requirements, while outlining future research directions to sustain progress in this rapidly evolving field. Project GitHub is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Awesome-DLMs.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 15 Pith papers
-
Mitigating Mask Prior Drift and Positional Attention Collapse in Large Diffusion Vision-Language Models
Mask prior drift and positional attention collapse cause failures in LDVLMs for long generations, fixed by training-free Mask Prior Suppression and Monotonic RoPE Scaling.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Diffusion Language Models for Speech Recognition
Diffusion language models and a CTC-USDM joint decoder improve ASR accuracy over standard approaches.
-
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.
-
Mitigating Mask Prior Drift and Positional Attention Collapse in Large Diffusion Vision-Language Models
Diagnoses mask prior drift and positional attention collapse in LDVLMs and introduces two plug-and-play decoding interventions that raise long-form generation quality without retraining.
-
ELF: Embedded Language Flows
ELF is a continuous embedding-space flow matching model for language that stays continuous until the last step and outperforms prior discrete and continuous diffusion language models with fewer sampling steps.
-
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.
-
Predict-then-Diffuse: Adaptive Response Length for Compute-Budgeted Inference in Diffusion LLMs
Predict-then-Diffuse predicts response lengths for diffusion LLMs via an auxiliary model and safety buffer to reduce FLOP waste while preserving output quality.
-
Saber: An Efficient Sampling with Adaptive Acceleration and Backtracking Enhanced Remasking for Diffusion Language Model
Saber improves both speed and accuracy of diffusion language models on code generation by dynamically adjusting unmasking steps and reverting low-confidence tokens via backtracking.
-
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.
-
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.
-
DMax: Aggressive Parallel Decoding for dLLMs
DMax enables faster parallel decoding in diffusion language models by using on-policy training to recover from errors and soft embedding interpolations for iterative revision, boosting tokens per forward pass roughly ...
-
Deep Thinking by Markov Chain of Continuous Thoughts
MarCos modifies transformers to perform continuous multi-step reasoning by mapping thought-level continuous states directly to next-thought distributions, achieving substantial wall-clock speedups on math problems.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.