Find approaches to the quality–compute and quality–latency trade-off during generation. SEDD discusses sampling compute; Block Diffusion studies block-wise generation and cache reuse.
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Does the compute count include guidance, cache work and batching, or only network evaluations?
At matched quality, output length, hardware and batch size, what latency and throughput were measured?
Fewer network evaluations do not by themselves prove lower end-to-end latency or an advantage in a serving workload.
A code link does not guarantee reproducibility. Check the original dataset, metric, protocol and conditions.
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for substantially faster inference through parallel decoding. Existing parallel decoding schedulers typically commit positions only after they meet a per-position criterion, overlooking how early commitments may benefit subsequent decoding. We identify a ripple effect in dLLM decoding: proactively committing a mid-entropy pivot position can induce a pronounced reduction in uncertainty across the remaining masked positions. This uncertainty reduction allows
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Diffusion language models (DLMs) iteratively refine a sequence, allowing earlier predictions to be revised as context evolves. This rollback capability distinguishes them from irreversible autoregressive generation, but makes inference costly. Every denoising update alters the global context, forcing both prompt and response states to be recomputed even though only response tokens are revisable. Key-value (KV) caching could reduce this cost, yet conventional caching assumes immutable historical states and is therefore difficult to reconcile with rollback. In this paper, we introduce Adaptive R
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Diffusion language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models by accelerating inference through parallel decoding. Recent dLLMs commonly use blockwise semi-autoregressive decoding, generating blocks autoregressively while denoising tokens within each active block in parallel. However, despite KV caching, each denoising step still attends to all previous blocks, repeatedly incurring prefix-attention cost. Motivated by this bottleneck, we ask whether dLLM inference can be further accelerated by linearizing attention over previous blocks. We introduce block-hybrid atten
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Diffusion language models (DLMs) expose a provisional prediction at every denoising step, creating an opportunity for generation-time early exit that stops decoding before the schedule is exhausted. Existing early-exit gates decide termination from fixed-region confidence statistics or schedule-dependent rules, evidence too coarse for a decision that freezes every remaining position at once, so they fire prematurely on long chain-of-thought outputs whose answers stabilize only near the end. Adaptive sampling, the other axis of training-free acceleration, paces how quickly positions commit whil
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Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a theoretical advantage in parallel generation over standard autoregressive models. However, parallel generation alone does not guarantee practical speedups. Realizing this efficiency requires specialized inference mechanisms, such as diffusion-aware caching and reuse. Consequently, as inference efficiency becomes a prerequisite for practical deployment, recent research has actively explored acceleration techniques across algorithms, architectures, and systems. However, rigorous comparisons remain difficult, as end-to-end latency stems from intrica
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2026-07-02T22:37:43+00:00 · Inference acceleration, Long context · Source
High-throughput long-context generation is one of the central challenges for large language models. Generation is typically memory-bandwidth-bound rather than compute-bound: each decoding step must stream the accumulated key/value (KV) cache from memory, so bandwidth demand grows with context length while only one token is emitted. Two parallel approaches have therefore emerged: reducing memory access with efficient attention variants and linear-time mixers such as Mamba, or increasing parallel computation by generating blocks of tokens at once. However, technical challenges arise when combini
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Block Diffusion Language Models (BD-LMs) improve diffusion-based text generation with KV caching and flexible-length generation. A natural next step is to extend them from Single-Block Diffusion (SingleBD) to Multi-Block Diffusion (MultiBD), where a running-set of consecutive blocks is decoded concurrently for inter-block parallelism. However, existing BD-LMs are mostly trained under teacher forcing, where the model observes only one noisy block conditioned on a clean prefix. While the recent diffusion forcing strategy introduces visibility among multiple noisy blocks, its training states stil
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Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional autoregressive language models. By generating multiple tokens in parallel during each denoising step, they offer higher inference throughput while maintaining competitive quality. However, realizing these throughput gains while meeting latency SLOs in a serving system requires addressing challenges introduced by DLMs' unique characteristics. These include navigating the speed-quality tradeoff created by confidence-based denoising, choosing appropriate parallelization levels across model insta
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2026-06-09T08:06:22+00:00 · Inference acceleration, Long context · Source
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with context length and becomes prohibitive for long-context scenarios. We propose Prefilling-dLLM, a training-free prefill-decode disaggregation framework for dLLMs that partitions the prefix into N chunks, caches their KV representations once, and selects the top-K most relevant chunks with intra-chunk token sparsity for decoding, showing that sparse prefilling can outperform dense attention while reducing per-step complexity from quadratic in t
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Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) enable non-autoregressive generation by iteratively denoising corrupted token sequences with bidirectional context. Despite their ability to update multiple positions in parallel, inference remains costly due to the many denoising steps required for high-quality generation. We propose SAID, a Scaffold-Aware Iterative Decoding framework that accelerates DLLMs by reallocating computation across tokens. SAID first spends denoising computation on scaffold tokens to establish the coarse semantic structure, and then completes predictable detail tokens with few
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Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding. However, their masked language modeling formulation remains incompatible with standard token-level speculative decoding, one of the most effective acceleration techniques for AR models. In AR decoding, the causal mask preserves temporally valid token-level contexts, enabling a target model to verify multiple drafted tokens in a single forward pass. In contrast, dLLMs rely on mask tokens and bidirectional attentio
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Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising multiple token positions in parallel, offering an attractive alternative to strictly autoregressive decoding. In practice, however, block-wise dLLM inference exposes a difficult granularity trade-off: small blocks preserve local conditioning but require many denoising steps, whereas large blocks expose more parallelism but can make premature commitments and accumulate cache error. Existing acceleration methods typically choose a single block size per request, leaving the complementarity among block sizes unused. We show t
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2026-05-20T07:06:54Z · Inference acceleration, Long context · Source
Inference in diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is computationally expensive, as full self-attention must be repeatedly executed at each step of the denoising process without KV cache. Recent sparse attention methods for dLLMs mitigate this cost via block-sparse computation, which is applied only in later iterations when model performance is less sensitive to coarse-grained sparse approximation, but yields limited improvements in computational efficiency and acceleration. This motivates a finer-grained sparsification strategy that can be applied from earlier iterations and leverages reusa
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