Diffusion Language Model Knows the Answer Before It Decodes

ICLROral2026

Authors
Pengxiang Li, Yefan Zhou, Dilxat Muhtar, Lu Yin, Shilin Yan, Li Shen, Yi Liang, Soroush Vosoughi, Shiwei Liu
Affiliation
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Venue
ICLR 2026
Track
Oral

TL;DR

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as an alternative to autoregressive approaches, offering parallel sequence generation and flexible token orders. However, their inference remains slower than that of autoregressive models, primarily due to the cost of bidirectional attention and the large number of refinement steps required...

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Topics

language model attention diffusion

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