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New research tackles diffusion language model limitations

Researchers are exploring new methods to improve diffusion language models (DLMs), which offer faster inference than autoregressive models. Several recent papers introduce techniques to enhance DLM performance, including NAVIRA for decoupled remasking, SARDI for retrieval-augmented generation using discarded tokens, and AXON for supportive token revealing. Another study identifies limitations in DLMs, such as a locality bias and distraction from mask tokens, proposing a mask-agnostic loss function to improve context comprehension. Additionally, a survey provides a comprehensive overview of the DLM landscape, covering foundational principles, state-of-the-art models, and future research directions. AI

IMPACT New techniques aim to improve the speed and accuracy of diffusion language models, potentially making them more competitive with autoregressive models.

RANK_REASON Multiple arXiv papers published on June 4, 2026, detailing new methods and analyses for diffusion language models.

Read on arXiv cs.CL →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 103 sources. How we write summaries →

New research tackles diffusion language model limitations

COVERAGE [103]

  1. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Amman Yusuf, Zhejun Jiang, Mijung Park ·

    The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

    arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and t…

  2. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Zhengtao Yao, Liuyang Song, Hongbo Zhang, Chenhao Wei, Haoyan Xu, Guang Yang, Siheng Wang ·

    TimeROME-DLM: Temporal Causal Tracing and Low-Rank Inference-Time Knowledge Editing for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.12841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) such as LLaDA now rival autoregressive (AR) LLMs, but every existing knowledge-editing and unlearning method (ROME, MEMIT, etc.) targets AR transformers and either makes assumptions that fa…

  3. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Hao Zou, Zachary Horvitz, Chandhru Karthick, Zhou Yu, Kathleen McKeown ·

    Detect, Remask, Repair: Diffusion Editing for Faithful Summarization of Evolving Contexts

    arXiv:2606.12807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Summaries of real-world events can become outdated as contexts evolve and new information arrives. A common response is to generate a new summary from the updated context, but full regeneration discards the previous draft, can obscu…

  4. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Jia Deng, Junyi Li, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jinpeng Wang, Hongyu Lu, Ji-Rong Wen ·

    Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.12273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token de…

  5. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Stipe Frkovic, Metod Jazbec, Dan Zhang, Christian A. Naesseth, Ilija Bogunovic, Eric Nalisnick ·

    Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked fo…

  6. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Kathleen McKeown ·

    Detect, Remask, Repair: Diffusion Editing for Faithful Summarization of Evolving Contexts

    Summaries of real-world events can become outdated as contexts evolve and new information arrives. A common response is to generate a new summary from the updated context, but full regeneration discards the previous draft, can obscure what changed, and may be unnecessary when onl…

  7. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Ji-Rong Wen ·

    Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirica…

  8. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirica…

  9. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

    Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has bee…

  10. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Eric Nalisnick ·

    Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

    Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has bee…

  11. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Jing Xiong, Qi Han, Shansan Gong, Yunta Hsieh, Chengyue Wu, Chaofan Tao, Chenyang Zhao, Ngai Wong ·

    Prefilling-dLLM: Predictive Prefilling for Long-Context Inference in Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.10537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with context length and becomes prohibitive for long-context scenarios. We propose Prefilli…

  12. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Vadim Popov, Wenju Gu, Tasnima Sadekova, Georgii Aparin, Assel Yermekova ·

    Optimality of FSQ Tokens for Continuous Diffusion for Categorical Data with Application to Text-to-Speech

    arXiv:2606.09962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous diffusion for categorical data is a framework belonging to the diffusion family and aiming at generating discrete data. The scientific interest to such models has been constantly increasing these days because researcher…

  13. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Yusuf Sahin, Ahmed Rockey Saikia, Volkan Cevher, Paolo Favaro ·

    Attention-Discounted Adaptive Sampler for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.10829v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models can reduce inference steps by revealing multiple tokens per denoising iteration, but this parallelism is fragile: positions that are individually confident may be unsafe to commit together when the…

  14. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Paolo Favaro ·

    Attention-Discounted Adaptive Sampler for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    Masked diffusion language models can reduce inference steps by revealing multiple tokens per denoising iteration, but this parallelism is fragile: positions that are individually confident may be unsafe to commit together when their predictions are coupled. Existing training-free…

  15. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    Prefilling-dLLM: Predictive Prefilling for Long-Context Inference in Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with context length and becomes prohibitive for long-context scenarios. We propose Prefilling-dLLM, a training-free prefill-decode disaggre…

  16. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Ngai Wong ·

    Prefilling-dLLM: Predictive Prefilling for Long-Context Inference in Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with context length and becomes prohibitive for long-context scenarios. We propose Prefilling-dLLM, a training-free prefill-decode disaggre…

  17. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Zanlin Ni, Shenzhi Wang, Yang Yue, Tianyu Yu, Weilin Zhao, Yeguo Hua, Tianyi Chen, Jun Song, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng, Gao Huang ·

    The Flexibility Trap: Rethinking the Value of Arbitrary Order in Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2601.15165v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution space that strictly supe…

  18. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Younghun Go, Jaehoon Han, Changyong Shin, Chuk Yoo, Gyeongsik Yang ·

    Enabling KV Caching of Shared Prefix for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.07571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Key-value (KV) caching for shared prefixes is essential for high-throughput large language model (LLM) serving, but it faces critical challenges in emerging diffusion language models (DLMs). In DLMs, bidirectional attention means …

  19. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Omin Kwon, Yeonjae Kim, Doyeon Kim, Minseo Kim, Yeonhong Park, Jae W. Lee ·

    MAGE: All-[MASK] Block Already Knows Where to Look in Block Diffusion LLM

    arXiv:2602.14209v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Block diffusion LLMs are an emerging paradigm for parallel language generation, but their KV caching makes memory access the dominant bottleneck in long-context inference. Sparse attention, which attends only to a small KV…

  20. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Eliron Rahimi, Elad Hirshel, Rom Himelstein, Amit LeVi, Avi Mendelson, Chaim Baskin ·

    Step-Wise Refusal Dynamics in Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2602.02600v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive (AR) models, offering parallel decoding, competitive generation quality, and initial evidence of improved jailbreak robu…

  21. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 Italiano(IT) · Xingyu Su, Jacob Helwig, Shubham Parashar, Atharv Chagi, Lakshmi Jotsna, Degui Zhi, James Caverlee, Dileep Kalathil, Shuiwang Ji ·

    Data-Efficient Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Language Models via On-Policy Distillation

    arXiv:2606.06712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transformation of autoregressive models (ARLMs) into diffusion language models (DLMs). Rather than pretraining from scratch, prior work replaces the causal attention in ARLMs with bidirectional attention and then trai…

  22. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 Deutsch(DE) · Bo Dai ·

    Forward-Free Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion language models generate text through iterative denoising, offering a powerful alternative to autoregressive generation. However, discrete language spaces lack a natural neighborhood structure for defining effective perturbations, so some artificial corruption schemes a…

  23. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Andrey Fomenko, Maksim Kryzhanovskiy, Svetlana Glazyrina, Roman Ischenko ·

    NAVIRA: Decoupled Stochastic Remasking for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.06031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models generate text by iteratively unmasking many tokens in parallel, but this speed comes with a correction problem: tokens generated in the same step are predicted from marginal distributions, and early …

  24. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Julianna Piskorz, Cristina Pinneri, Alvaro Correia, Motasem Alfarra, Risheek Garrepalli, Christos Louizos ·

    Masks Can Be Distracting: On Context Comprehension in Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2511.21338v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisa…

  25. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Tianyi Li, Mingda Chen, Bowei Guo, Zhiqiang Shen ·

    A Survey on Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2508.10875v3 Announce Type: replace 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 in…

  26. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Paul J\"unger, Justin Lovelace, Linxi Zhao, Dongyoung Go, Kilian Q. Weinberger ·

    Self-Augmenting Retrieval for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.06474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models generate text by iteratively denoising an entire response in parallel. At each step, they predict tentative tokens for every masked position, committing the confident predictions to the output and …

  27. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 Italiano(IT) · Shuiwang Ji ·

    Data-Efficient Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Language Models via On-Policy Distillation

    We study the transformation of autoregressive models (ARLMs) into diffusion language models (DLMs). Rather than pretraining from scratch, prior work replaces the causal attention in ARLMs with bidirectional attention and then trains the resulting model using a DLM objective. Howe…

  28. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Kilian Q. Weinberger ·

    Self-Augmenting Retrieval for Diffusion Language Models

    Discrete diffusion language models generate text by iteratively denoising an entire response in parallel. At each step, they predict tentative tokens for every masked position, committing the confident predictions to the output and discarding the unconfident ones. We show that th…

  29. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Roman Ischenko ·

    NAVIRA: Decoupled Stochastic Remasking for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    Masked diffusion language models generate text by iteratively unmasking many tokens in parallel, but this speed comes with a correction problem: tokens generated in the same step are predicted from marginal distributions, and early local dependency errors can later contaminate th…

  30. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Xin Yan, Aqiang Wang, Zhenglin Wan, Xingrui Yuand Ivor Tsang ·

    STaR-Quant: State-Time Consistent Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Large Language Models

    arXiv:2606.04945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs by generating text through iterative masked denoising with bidirectional context. However, their large model sizes and i…

  31. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Jianhao Huang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman ·

    Tuning the Implicit Regularizer of Masked Diffusion Language Models: Enhancing Generalization via Insights from $k$-Parity

    arXiv:2601.22450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Masked Diffusion Language Models have recently emerged as a powerful generative paradigm, yet their generalization properties remain understudied compared to their auto-regressive counterparts. In this work, we investigate…

  32. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Boyan Han, Yiwei Wang, Yi Song, Yujun Cai, Chi Zhang ·

    Dynamic Infilling Anchors for Format-Constrained Generation in Diffusion Large Language Models

    arXiv:2606.04535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer bidirectional attention and parallel generation, enabling them to exploit global context and naturally support format-constrained tasks like parseable JSON or reasoning templates. Whil…

  33. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Giries Abu Ayoub, Mario Barbara, Llu\'is Pastor-P\'erez, Tanja Bien, Aneesh Barthakur, Alaa Maalouf, Loay Mualem ·

    Supportive Token Revealing for Fast Diffusion Language Model Decoding

    arXiv:2606.04236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models can generate text efficiently by updating multiple masked positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a quality-latency trade-off. Aggressive decoding may commit mutually dependent tok…

  34. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Anant Khandelwal, Manish Gupta ·

    Read the Trace, Steer the Path: Trajectory-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.04396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate responses by iteratively unmasking and revising many positions in parallel. This process leaves a rich denoising trace depicting which tokens become confident, which remain unstable, …

  35. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Na Li, Chengda Wang, Mingju Gao, Hao Tang ·

    SAID: Accelerating Diffusion-Based Language Models via Scaffold-Aware Iterative Decoding

    arXiv:2606.04974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) enable non-autoregressive generation by iteratively denoising corrupted token sequences with bidirectional context. Despite their ability to update multiple positions in parallel, inference re…

  36. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Hanchen Xia, Baoyou Chen, Yutang Ge, Guojiang Zhao, Siyu Zhu ·

    T$^\star$: Progressive Block Scaling for Masked Diffusion Language Models Through Trajectory Aware Reinforcement Learning

    arXiv:2601.11214v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present T$^\star$, a simple TraceRL-based training curriculum for progressive block-size scaling in masked diffusion language models (MDMs). Starting from an AR-initialized small-block MDM, T$^\star$ transitions smoothly to l…

  37. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Yuyan Zhou, Kai Syun Hou, Weiyu Chen, James Kwok ·

    Attention-Based Sampler for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2604.08564v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Auto-regressive models (ARMs) have established a dominant paradigm in language modeling. However, their strictly sequential sampling paradigm imposes fundamental constraints on both inference efficiency and modeling flexibility.…

  38. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 Italiano(IT) ·

    Data-Efficient Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Language Models via On-Policy Distillation

    Autoregressive language models are transformed into diffusion language models through on-policy distillation that eliminates train-inference mismatch and reduces training token requirements.

  39. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    SAID: Accelerating Diffusion-Based Language Models via Scaffold-Aware Iterative Decoding

    Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) enable non-autoregressive generation by iteratively denoising corrupted token sequences with bidirectional context. Despite their ability to update multiple positions in parallel, inference remains costly due to the many denoising steps req…

  40. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Hao Tang ·

    SAID: Accelerating Diffusion-Based Language Models via Scaffold-Aware Iterative Decoding

    Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) enable non-autoregressive generation by iteratively denoising corrupted token sequences with bidirectional context. Despite their ability to update multiple positions in parallel, inference remains costly due to the many denoising steps req…

  41. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    STaR-Quant: State-Time Consistent Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Large Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs by generating text through iterative masked denoising with bidirectional context. However, their large model sizes and iterative denoising process introduce substantial…

  42. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Xingrui Yuand Ivor Tsang ·

    STaR-Quant: State-Time Consistent Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Large Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs by generating text through iterative masked denoising with bidirectional context. However, their large model sizes and iterative denoising process introduce substantial…

  43. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Chi Zhang ·

    Dynamic Infilling Anchors for Format-Constrained Generation in Diffusion Large Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer bidirectional attention and parallel generation, enabling them to exploit global context and naturally support format-constrained tasks like parseable JSON or reasoning templates. While straightforward fixed anchors can enforce such c…

  44. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Zhiyuan Liu, Yicun Yang, Yaojie Zhang, Junjie Chen, Chang Zou, Qingyuan Wei, Shaobo Wang, Yichen Zhu, Linfeng Zhang ·

    dLLM-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with Adaptive Caching

    arXiv:2506.06295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive Models (ARMs) have long dominated the landscape of Large Language Models. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in the form of diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs), which generate text by iteratively…

  45. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Miao Li, Hanyang Jiang, Sikai Cheng, Hengyu Fu, Yuhang Cai, Baihe Huang, Tinghan Ye, Xuanzhou Chen, Pascal Van Hentenryck ·

    Plan, Verify and Fill: A Structured Parallel Decoding Approach for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2601.12247v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) present a promising non-sequential paradigm for text generation, distinct from standard autoregressive (AR) approaches. However, current decoding strategies often adopt a reactive stance, u…

  46. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Zhenbang Du, Kejing Xia, Xinrui Zhong, Yonggan Fu, Nicolai Oswald, Binfei Ji, Brucek Khailany, Pavlo Molchanov, Yingyan Lin ·

    $R^2$-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models via Spatio-Temporal Redundancy Reduction

    arXiv:2604.18995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction. However, practical dLLM decoding still suffers from high inference latency…

  47. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Haewon Park, Yohan Jo ·

    Knowledge Editing in Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.03924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge editing aims to update or correct factual knowledge in a language model. A widely used approach, locate-then-edit, does this in two steps: it first localizes a fact within the model, then edits the weights there. To date, …

  48. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Metod Jazbec, Theo X. Olausson, Louis B\'ethune, Pierre Ablin, Michael Kirchhof, Jo\~ao Monteiro, Victor Turrisi, Jason Ramapuram, Marco Cuturi ·

    Learning Unmasking Policies for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2512.09106v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion (Large) Language Models (dLLMs) now match the downstream performance of their autoregressive counterparts on many tasks, while holding the promise of being more efficient during inference. One critical design aspect of…

  49. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 Dansk(DA) · Daniel Yiming Cao, Chengzhong Wang, Sheng-Yen Chou, Chengyu Huang, Pin-Yu Chen, Shengwei An ·

    Backdooring Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.19262v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are emerging as a compelling new paradigm for text generation, but their training-time security remains largely unexplored. Existing backdoor attacks on Gaussian diffusion models or autor…

  50. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    Read the Trace, Steer the Path: Trajectory-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate responses by iteratively unmasking and revising many positions in parallel. This process leaves a rich denoising trace depicting which tokens become confident, which remain unstable, and when commitments form. Existing dLLM reinfor…

  51. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Yohan Jo ·

    Knowledge Editing in Masked Diffusion Language Models

    Knowledge editing aims to update or correct factual knowledge in a language model. A widely used approach, locate-then-edit, does this in two steps: it first localizes a fact within the model, then edits the weights there. To date, such methods have been developed exclusively on …

  52. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Mengyu Ye, Keito Kudo, Ryosuke Takahashi, Jun Suzuki ·

    Reconsidering Positional Supervision in Masked Diffusion Language Model Training

    arXiv:2601.22947v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text by unmasking tokens in parallel and have recently emerged as alternatives to autoregressive language models. They can be viewed as parallel decoders trained with a position-…

  53. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Longxuan Yu, Shaorong Zhang, Yu Fu, Hui Liu, Yue Dong, Greg Ver Steeg ·

    Revise, Don't Freeze: Sampler-Matched Training for Self-Correcting Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.01026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) re-predict every position at each denoising step, but standard samplers commit tokens once revealed, leaving this revision capability unused. Existing approaches either add heuristic or learn…

  54. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 Dansk(DA) · David Li, Nikita Gushchin, Dmitry Abulkhanov, Eric Moulines, Ivan Oseledets, Maxim Panov, Alexander Korotin ·

    IDLM: Inverse-distilled Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2602.19066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently achieved strong results in text generation. However, their multi-step sampling leads to slow inference, limiting practical use. To address this, we extend Inverse Distillation…

  55. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang ·

    SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding. However, their masked language modeling formul…

  56. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Yuchen Zhu, Jing Shi, Chongjian Ge, Hao Tan, Yiran Xu, Wanrong Zhu, Jason Kuen, Koustava Goswami, Rajiv Jain, Yongxin Chen, Molei Tao, Jiuxiang Gu ·

    FLARE: Diffusion for Hybrid Language Model

    arXiv:2606.01774v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved broad practical success, but sequential decoding remains a key bottleneck for low-latency deployment. Recent efficient-inference work has progressed along two axes: re…

  57. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Hyundong Jin, Yo-Sub Han ·

    EPIC: Efficient and Parallel Inference under CFG Constraints for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.00722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Controlling language model outputs is essential for ensuring structural validity, reliability, and downstream usability, and diffusion language models are no exception. Recent advances in diffusion language model decoding have ext…

  58. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Sangdae Nam ·

    DLLM-JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2606.00091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have reshaped self-supervised representation learning in vision. The recent LLM-JEPA ported JEPA to autoregressive language models but inherited two steep costs from the causal-atte…

  59. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Yichuan Mo, Yukun Jiang, Yanbo Shi, Mingjie Li, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang, Yisen Wang ·

    TrustLDM: Benchmarking Trustworthiness in Language Diffusion Models

    arXiv:2606.00023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Language Diffusion Models (LDMs) challenges the dominant position of auto-regressive competitors in language processing. However, their flexible, any-order decoding strategies not only enable fast decoding…

  60. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Guanghan Wang, Gilad Turok, Yair Schiff, Marianne Arriola, Volodymyr Kuleshov ·

    d2: Improving Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Likelihood Estimation

    arXiv:2509.21474v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area. Here, we introduce d2, a reasoning f…

  61. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Jingbo Shang ·

    SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding. However, their masked language modeling formulation remains incompatible with standard token-lev…

  62. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Pyo Min Hong, Albert No ·

    dgMARK: Decoding-Guided Watermarking for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2601.22985v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose dgMARK, a decoding-guided watermarking method for discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs). Unlike autoregressive models, dLLMs can generate tokens in arbitrary order. While an ideal conditional predictor would be i…

  63. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Nianyi Lin, Jiajie Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li ·

    Boundary-Guided Policy Optimization for Memory-efficient RL of Diffusion Large Language Models

    arXiv:2510.11683v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding …

  64. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Zhihan Yang, Yash Akhauri, Johnna Liu, Deepansha Singh, Zhoujun Cheng, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, John Thickstun, Arash Vahdat ·

    Esoteric Language Models: A Family of Any-Order Diffusion LLMs

    arXiv:2506.01928v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still u…

  65. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Injin Kong, Hyoungjoon Lee, Yohan Jo ·

    Mechanism Shift During Post-training from Autoregressive to Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2601.14758v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-training pretrained autoregressive models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) has emerged as a cost-effective way to overcome the limitations of sequential generation. Yet it remains unclear whether post-traine…

  66. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Xiaohang Tang, Keyue Jiang, Che Liu, Qifang Zhao, Xiaoxiao Xu, Sangwoong Yoon, Ilija Bogunovic ·

    GDSD: Reinforcement Learning as Guided Denoiser Self-Distillation for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.29398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to improve the policy (denoiser) of diffusion large language models (dLLMs), while being hindered by the intractability of the policy likelihood. A dominant and efficient family of methods r…

  67. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Xiaoyou Wu (Celine), Cheng-Jhih Shih (Celine), Binfei Ji (Celine), Yong Liu (Celine), Yingyan (Celine), Lin ·

    BlockBatch: Multi-Scale Consensus Decoding for Efficient Diffusion Language Model Inference

    arXiv:2605.29233v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising multiple token positions in parallel, offering an attractive alternative to strictly autoregressive decoding. In practice, however, block-wise dLLM inference…

  68. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Luhan Tang, Longxuan Yu, Shaorong Zhang, Greg Ver Steeg ·

    Is Your Diffusion Sampler Actually Correct? A Sampler-Centric Evaluation of Discrete Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2602.19619v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) provide a fast and flexible alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) via iterative denoising with parallel updates. However, their evaluation is challenging: existing metrics conflat…

  69. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Heqiang Qi, Wei Huang, Mingyuan Bai, Xiangming Meng ·

    Cluster-Level Attention-Guided Parallel Decoding for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.29607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) enable parallel decoding by predicting all masked positions at each denoising step, yet existing training-free samplers usually decide which positions to commit at token-level granularity. We…

  70. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Shuai Wang, Yu Yin, Shengyao Zhuang, Bevan Koopman, Guido Zuccon ·

    DiffRetriever: Parallel Representative Tokens for Retrieval with Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.07210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper shows how diffusion language models (DLMs) can be used as effective and efficient retrievers. Existing DLM-based retrievers (e.g., DiffEmbed) follow BERT-style encoding, representing each query or passage as a s…

  71. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Hyeseon An, Yo-Sub Han ·

    DLM-SWAI: Steering Diffusion Language Models Before They Unmask

    arXiv:2605.29626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steering language model generation toward desired textual properties is essential for practical deployment, and inference-time methods are particularly appealing because they enable controllable generation without retraining. Rece…

  72. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Jinwoo Kim, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Loris D'Antoni ·

    Continuous Diffusion Models Can Obey Formal Syntax

    arXiv:2602.12468v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their global, non-causal generation process, but their continuous latent dynamics make discrete constraints -- e.g., the output should be a …

  73. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Xiangyu Ma, Teng Xiao, Zuchao Li, Lefei Zhang ·

    From AR to Diffusion: Efficiently Adapting Large Language Models with Strictly Causal and Elastic Horizons

    arXiv:2605.27387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models promise efficient parallel text generation but rely on bidirectional attention, creating a structural mismatch with pre-trained Autoregressive (AR) models. This incompatibility precludes reusing robust AR priors, …

  74. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Yu Zhao, Mihaela C\u{a}t\u{a}lina Stoian, Wenda Li, Shay B. Cohen, Eleonora Giunchiglia ·

    Can I Have Your Order? Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Slot Filling Ordering in Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2602.12586v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While plan-and-infill decoding in Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) shows promise for mathematical and code reasoning, performance remains highly sensitive to slot infilling order, often yielding substantial output variance. We int…

  75. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Jiyeon Kim, Sungik Choi, Yongrae Jo, Moontae Lee, Minjoon Seo ·

    Early Decisions Matter: Proximity Bias and Initial Trajectory Shaping in Non-Autoregressive Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2604.10567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessin…

  76. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Jiaoyang Ruan, Xin Gao, Yinda Chen, Hengyu Zeng, Liang Du, Guanghao Li, Jie Fu, Jian Pu ·

    Reasoning on the Manifold: Bidirectional Consistency for Self-Verification in Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2604.16565v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer structural advantages for global planning, efficiently verifying that they arrive at correct answers via valid reasoning traces remains a critical challenge. In this work…

  77. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Jungwon Park, Jimyeong Kim, Jungmin Ko, Nojun Kwak, Wonjong Rhee ·

    When Confidence Misleads: Suffix Anchoring and Anchor-Proximity Confidence Modulation for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.28181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models decode text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, making the choice of which positions to decode a central inference-time decision. Most training-free decoding strategies use model confidence for…

  78. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    GDSD: Reinforcement Learning as Guided Denoiser Self-Distillation for Diffusion Language Models

    Guided Denoiser Self-Distillation (GDSD) improves diffusion large language models by directly distilling denoisers from advantage-guided self-teachers, avoiding biases introduced by ELBO likelihood surrogates and achieving superior performance on benchmark tasks.

  79. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Wonjong Rhee ·

    When Confidence Misleads: Suffix Anchoring and Anchor-Proximity Confidence Modulation for Diffusion Language Models

    Diffusion language models decode text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, making the choice of which positions to decode a central inference-time decision. Most training-free decoding strategies use model confidence for position selection, assuming that high-confiden…

  80. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Lin Yao ·

    Targeted Remasking: Replacing Token Editing with Token-to-Mask Refinement in Discrete Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.26436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete masked diffusion language models such as LLaDA generate text through iterative denoising, where mask tokens are progressively replaced with predicted tokens. LLaDA2.1 introduced a Token-to-Token (T2T) editing mechanism th…

  81. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    When Confidence Misleads: Suffix Anchoring and Anchor-Proximity Confidence Modulation for Diffusion Language Models

    Researchers investigate how confidence-based decoding in fully non-autoregressive models can be improved by addressing issues with EOT tokens and premature decoding through suffix-anchored confidence modulation.

  82. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Wenhao Sun, Rong-Cheng Tu, Yifu Ding, Zhao Jin, Jingyi Liao, Yongcheng Jing, Dacheng Tao ·

    SPA-Cache: Singular Proxies for Adaptive Caching in Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2602.02544v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a flexible, arbitrary-order alternative to the autoregressive paradigm, their non-causal nature precludes standard KV caching, forcing costly hidden state recomputation at every…

  83. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Yihan Wang, N. Asokan ·

    Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Language Models via Infilling

    arXiv:2605.24173v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Memorization in large language models has been studied almost exclusively through prefix-conditioned extraction, a natural choice for autoregressive models. However, diffusion language models (DLMs) can denoise masked tokens at ar…

  84. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Arseny Ivanov, Sergei Kholkin, Vladislav Gromadskii, Grigoriy Ksenofontov, Ivan Oseledets, Alexander Korotin ·

    TUBE: Tangent Upper Bound on Evidence for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.24292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Log-likelihood is a standard metric for evaluating generative models. Unfortunately, in contrast to autoregressive models (ARMs), discrete diffusion models generally do not admit exact computation of this quantity. Existing evaluati…

  85. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Omer Luxembourg, Haim Permuter, Eliya Nachmani ·

    Plan for Speed: Dilated Scheduling for Masked Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2506.19037v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) promise fast, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing samplers, which pick tokens to unmask based on model confidence, ignore interactions when unmasking multiple positions…

  86. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Bohang Sun, Max Zhu, Francesco Caso, Jindong Gu, Junchi Yu, Philip Torr, Pietro Li\`o, Jialin Yu ·

    The Path Matters: Learning a Token-Commitment Policy for Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.24697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models promise faster generation by refining many token positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a hidden control problem: which proposed tokens should be transferred into the partially decod…

  87. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Sanghyun Lee, Chunsan Hong, Seungryong Kim, Jonghyun Lee, Jongho Park, Dongmin Park ·

    Looped Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.26106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for language modeling, yet the effective design of transformer architectures for MDMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that…

  88. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Dongmin Park ·

    Looped Diffusion Language Models

    Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for language modeling, yet the effective design of transformer architectures for MDMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that selectively looping the early-middle transforme…

  89. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    Looped Diffusion Language Models

    Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for language modeling, yet the effective design of transformer architectures for MDMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that selectively looping the early-middle transforme…

  90. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Shubham Parashar, Atharv Chagi, Jacob Helwig, Lakshmi Jotsna, Sushil Vemuri, James Caverlee, Dileep Kalathil, Shuiwang Ji ·

    Learnability-Informed Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2605.22939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We aim to improve the reasoning capabilities of diffusion language models (DLMs). While SFT is a popular post-training recipe for autoregressive models, its use in DLMs faces challenges and can even hurt performance, though the unde…

  91. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Linye Wei, Zixiang Luo, Pingzhi Tang, Meng Li ·

    TEAM: Temporal-Spatial Consistency Guided Expert Activation for MoE Diffusion Language Model Acceleration

    arXiv:2602.08404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their inherent support for parallel decoding. Building on this paradigm, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) dLLMs with autoregressive (AR) initializ…

  92. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Chen-Hao Chao, Wei-Fang Sun, Junwei Quan, Chun-Yi Lee, Rahul G. Krishnan ·

    MDM-Prime-v2: Binary Encoding and Index Shuffling Enable Scaling of Diffusion Language Models

    arXiv:2603.16077v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDM) exhibit superior generalization when learned using a Partial masking scheme (Prime). This approach converts tokens into sub-tokens and models the diffusion process at the sub-token level. We identif…

  93. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Shuiwang Ji ·

    Learnability-Informed Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Language Models

    We aim to improve the reasoning capabilities of diffusion language models (DLMs). While SFT is a popular post-training recipe for autoregressive models, its use in DLMs faces challenges and can even hurt performance, though the underlying causes remain understudied. Our analysis …

  94. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Liqiang Nie ·

    PulseCol: Periodically Refreshed Column-Sparse Attention for Accelerating Diffusion Language Models

    Inference in diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is computationally expensive, as full self-attention must be repeatedly executed at each step of the denoising process without KV cache. Recent sparse attention methods for dLLMs mitigate this cost via block-sparse computation,…

  95. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    Efficient Long-Context Modeling in Diffusion Language Models via Block Approximate Sparse Attention

    Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable globally coherent, bidirectional, and controllable text generation, offering advantages over traditional autoregressive LLMs, while scaling to ultra-long sequences remains costly. Many existing block-sparse attention methods select blocks b…

  96. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Naoaki Okazaki ·

    Drifting Objectives for Refining Discrete Diffusion Language Models

    Discrete diffusion language models (DDLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising categorical token sequences, while recent drifting methods for continuous generators suggest that part of this sampling-time correction can instead be absorbed into training through an anti-symmetri…

  97. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · James Kwok ·

    Dynamic Chunking for Diffusion Language Models

    Block discrete diffusion language models factorize a sequence autoregressively over fixed-size positional blocks, decoupling within-block parallel denoising from across-block conditioning. We argue that this rigid partition wastes structure already present in the sequence: blocks…

  98. arXiv cs.CV TIER_1 English(EN) · Marian Lupascu, Nipun Jindal, Ionut Mironica, Zhaowen Wang ·

    FontFusion: Enhancing Generative Text in Diffusion Models with Typographic Conditioning

    arXiv:2606.06066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Typography generation in diffusion models faces a persistent trade-off: enabling precise font control typically degrades text legibility, while maintaining readability often sacrifices typographic fidelity. We present FontFusion, a …

  99. arXiv cs.CV TIER_1 English(EN) · Zhaowen Wang ·

    FontFusion: Enhancing Generative Text in Diffusion Models with Typographic Conditioning

    Typography generation in diffusion models faces a persistent trade-off: enabling precise font control typically degrades text legibility, while maintaining readability often sacrifices typographic fidelity. We present FontFusion, a plug-and-play conditioning framework for Diffusi…

  100. arXiv cs.CV TIER_1 English(EN) · Jiaya Jia ·

    Efficient Long-Context Modeling in Diffusion Language Models via Block Approximate Sparse Attention

    Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable globally coherent, bidirectional, and controllable text generation, offering advantages over traditional autoregressive LLMs, while scaling to ultra-long sequences remains costly. Many existing block-sparse attention methods select blocks b…

  101. arXiv stat.ML TIER_1 English(EN) · Zhihan Yang, Wei Guo, Shuibai Zhang, Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Yongxin Chen, Arash Vahdat, Morteza Mardani, John Thickstun ·

    Continuous Diffusion Scales Competitively with Discrete Diffusion for Language

    arXiv:2605.18530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While diffusion has drawn considerable recent attention from the language modeling community, continuous diffusion has appeared less scalable than discrete approaches. To challenge this belief we revisit Plaid, a likelihood-based …

  102. arXiv stat.ML TIER_1 English(EN) · John Thickstun ·

    Continuous Diffusion Scales Competitively with Discrete Diffusion for Language

    While diffusion has drawn considerable recent attention from the language modeling community, continuous diffusion has appeared less scalable than discrete approaches. To challenge this belief we revisit Plaid, a likelihood-based continuous diffusion language model (DLM), and con…

  103. r/LocalLLaMA TIER_1 Dansk(DA) · /u/Glittering_Painting8 ·

    [OSS] dlmserve - first serving engine for diffusion language models

    <!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Spent the last few months building this on a single <strong>RTX 5070</strong>.</p> <p>Quick context: <strong>diffusion language models</strong> (like <a href="https://huggingface.co/gsai-ml/LLaDA-8B-Instruct">LLaDA</a> from gsai-ml) are a differe…