2026
Scaling Beyond Masked Diffusion Language Models
Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Jean-Marie Lemercier, Zhihan Yang, Justin Deschenaux, Jingyu Liu, John Thickstun +1
ICML 2026poster
Diffusion language models are a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for faster generation. Among discrete diffusion approaches, Masked diffusion currently dominates, largely driven by strong perplexity on language modeling benchmarks. In this work, we present the fi…