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John Thickstun

10 accepted papers

2026

Scaling Beyond Masked Diffusion Language Models

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…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Linearly Constrained Diffusion Implicit Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

We introduce Linearly Constrained Diffusion Implicit Models (CDIM), a fast and accurate approach to solving noisy linear inverse problems using diffusion models. Traditional diffusion-based inverse methods rely on numerous projection steps to enforce measurement consistency in addition to unconditio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Controlling the behavior of language models (LMs) without re-training is a major open problem in natural language generation. While recent works have demonstrated successes on controlling simple sentence attributes (e.g., sentiment), there has been little progress on complex, fine-grained controls (…

2021

MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers

NeurIPS 2021oral

As major progress is made in open-ended text generation, measuring how close machine-generated text is to human language remains a critical open problem. We introduce Mauve, a comparison measure for open-ended text generation, which directly compares the learnt distribution from a text generation mo…

Cited by 355SourcePDFScholar
2021

Parallel and Flexible Sampling from Autoregressive Models via Langevin Dynamics

ICML 2021spotlight

This paper introduces an alternative approach to sampling from autoregressive models. Autoregressive models are typically sampled sequentially, according to the transition dynamics defined by the model. Instead, we propose a sampling procedure that initializes a sequence with white noise and follows…

2018

Invariances and Data Augmentation for Supervised Music Transcription

ICASSP 2018accepted

This paper explores a variety of models for frame-based music transcription, with an emphasis on the methods needed to reach state-of-the-art on human recordings. The translation-invariant network discussed in this paper, which combines a traditional filterbank with a convolutional neural network, w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar