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UNIFUSION: Adapting Autoregressive Language Models into Discrete Diffusion under a Unified Reverse-Rate Objective

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TL;DR - UNIFUSION converts pretrained autoregressive language models into uniform-noise diffusion models under a unified reverse-rate objective, allowing every token to remain editable during generation. It offers a shared interface across diffusion formulations and improves generation-quality and benchmark results over compared diffusion models.

  • Unifies SEDD, MDLM/GIDD, M2S, and Neural CTMC conditional losses as a generalized KL objective over reverse rates.
  • Converts clean-token predictions into multiple diffusion parameterizations, enabling switches between mask and uniform corruption kernels.
  • Continually pretrains 124M- and 355M-parameter GPT-2 checkpoints for uniform-noise diffusion.
  • Shows improving GenPPL–entropy trade-offs with larger sampling budgets and leads compared diffusion models on WinoGrande, SIQA, and BBH at both scales.

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UNIFUSION: Adapting Autoregressive Language Models into Discrete Diffusion under a Unified Reverse-Rate Objective

arXiv cs.LG Xiaoyi Jiang, Jingyuan Li, Yixuan Jiang, Wei Liu, Yi Zhu, Zuoqiang Shi, Pipi Hu 2026-07-27 arXiv:2607.24507

TL;DR - UNIFUSION converts pretrained autoregressive language models into uniform-noise diffusion models under a unified reverse-rate objective, allowing every token to remain editable during generation. It offers a shared interface across diffusion formulations and improves generation-quality and benchmark results over compared diffusion models.

  • Unifies SEDD, MDLM/GIDD, M2S, and Neural CTMC conditional losses as a generalized KL objective over reverse rates.
  • Converts clean-token predictions into multiple diffusion parameterizations, enabling switches between mask and uniform corruption kernels.
  • Continually pretrains 124M- and 355M-parameter GPT-2 checkpoints for uniform-noise diffusion.
  • Shows improving GenPPL–entropy trade-offs with larger sampling budgets and leads compared diffusion models on WinoGrande, SIQA, and BBH at both scales.
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