https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09573

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2503.09573 (cs)
[Submitted on 12 Mar 2025]

Title:Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and
Diffusion Language Models

Authors:Marianne Arriola, Aaron Gokaslan, Justin T Chiu, Zhihan Yang,
Zhixuan Qi, Jiaqi Han, Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Volodymyr Kuleshov
View a PDF of the paper titled Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between
Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models, by Marianne Arriola and
7 other authors
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    Abstract:Diffusion language models offer unique benefits over
    autoregressive models due to their potential for parallelized
    generation and controllability, yet they lag in likelihood
    modeling and are limited to fixed-length generation. In this
    work, we introduce a class of block diffusion language models
    that interpolate between discrete denoising diffusion and
    autoregressive models. Block diffusion overcomes key limitations
    of both approaches by supporting flexible-length generation and
    improving inference efficiency with KV caching and parallel token
    sampling. We propose a recipe for building effective block
    diffusion models that includes an efficient training algorithm,
    estimators of gradient variance, and data-driven noise schedules
    to minimize the variance. Block diffusion sets a new
    state-of-the-art performance among diffusion models on language
    modeling benchmarks and enables generation of arbitrary-length
    sequences. We provide the code, along with the model weights and
    blog post on the project page: this https URL

Comments: ICLR 2025 Oral. We provide the code at this https URL
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as:  arXiv:2503.09573 [cs.LG]
          (or arXiv:2503.09573v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.09573
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Marianne Arriola [view email]
[v1] Wed, 12 Mar 2025 17:43:40 UTC (294 KB)
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    Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models, by Marianne
    Arriola and 7 other authors
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