Diffusion LM papers in 2026

Not an exhaustive catalog: these are core papers recorded in the public corpus. Paper counts do not measure quality or the importance of a method.

UTC: .

Core papers matching the current filters: 4.

By month and topic
MonthPapers
January0
February0
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April0
May4
June0
July0
August0
September0

Topics can overlap: a paper counts once in each of its topics, but only once in the total. A topic assignment does not prove quality or reproducibility.

Latest papers · Selection methodology

2026-05-28T08:42:39+00:00 · Masked / discrete diffusion, Reasoning · Source

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

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 revisit this granularity and observe that reliable predictions often emerge as contiguous high-confidence spans, suggesting that the unit of parallel commitment can be larger than a single token. We first group adjacent high-confidence candidates into confidence-induced clusters (CICs) as span-level update units. We then use self-attention maps from the same forwar

Useful for: Not assessed · Limitation: Not assessed

2026-05-25T17:58:24+00:00 · Masked / discrete diffusion, Reasoning · Source

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 transformer layers significantly improves both training efficiency and model performance in MDMs. We call this approach LoopMDM(Looped Masked Diffusion Model), which brings two key benefits: looping layers at training-time yields a depth-scaling effect without adding parameters, while varying the number of loops at inference-tim

Useful for: Not assessed · Limitation: Not assessed

2026-05-21T18:16:17+00:00 · Reasoning, Post-training · Source

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 reveals that vanilla SFT overlooks learnability, namely what and when tokens are learned. Specifically, rare tokens are difficult to learn when most of the input is masked, whereas it is straightforward and thus of little value to learn common tokens when most of the input is unmasked. Motivated by our analysis, we pro

Useful for: Not assessed · Limitation: Not assessed

2026-05-18T06:39:10+00:00 · Masked / discrete diffusion, Long context, Reasoning · Source

Prompt Compression in Diffusion Large Language Models: Evaluating LLMLingua-2 on LLaDA

Prompt compression reduces inference cost and context length in large language models, but prior evaluations focus primarily on autoregressive architectures. This study investigates whether prompt compression transfers effectively to diffusion large language models (DLLMs) using LLMLingua-2, specifically the 8B-parameter DLLM LLaDA. We evaluate compression performance on GSM8K, DUC2004, and ShareGPT using 250 prompts per dataset at an approximate 2$\times$ compression ratio, across mathematical reasoning, prompt reconstruction, and summarization tasks. Outputs generated from original prompts,

Useful for: Not assessed · Limitation: Not assessed

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