The Diffusion Duality

Uniform-state discrete diffusion models hold the promise of fast text generation due to their inherent ability to self-correct. However, they are typically outperformed by autoregressive models and masked diffusion models. In this work, we narrow this performance gap by leveraging a key insight: Uniform-state diffusion processes naturally emerge from an underlying Gaussian diffusion. Our method, Duo, transfers powerful techniques from Gaussian diffusion to improve both training and sampling. First, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy guided by the Gaussian process, doubling training speed by reducing variance. Models trained with curriculum learning surpass autoregressive models in zero-shot perplexity on 3 of 7 benchmarks. Second, we present Discrete Consistency Distillation, which adapts consistency distillation from the continuous to the discrete setting. This algorithm unlocks few-step generation in diffusion language models by accelerating sampling by two orders of magnitude. We provide the code and model checkpoints on the project page: https: //s-sahoo. github. io/duo

Authors

• Subham Sekhar Sahoo
• Justin Deschenaux
• Aaron Gokaslan
• Guanghan Wang
• Justin T. Chiu
• Volodymyr Kuleshov

Keywords

• diffusion language models
• diffusion models
• large language models
• distillation