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S26 | Self-conditioned Flow Map Language Models via Fixed-point Flows
Jaehoon Yoo and Wonjung Kim study self-conditioning in flow-based language models, where the model denoises text while conditioning on its own denoising estimate. They show that self-conditioning solves a fixed-point iteration that bootstraps the learned denoiser, and they use this view to define fixed-point flows, a two-dimensional class of self-conditioned flows spanning the flow process and the fixed-point iteration. Distilling both dimensions yields FMLM★, a flow map language model that outperforms state-of-the-art self-conditioned and few-step models in one- and few-step generation on OpenWebText.
S25 | FLARE: Diffusion for Hybrid Language Model
Yuchen Zhu (Georgia Tech) presents FLARE, a framework that turns a hybrid-attention autoregressive (AR) LLM into one that also runs diffusion-style parallel decoding, so a single checkpoint supports both AR verified decoding and diffusion denoising. The authors find that transfer data quality, more than the loss formulation or attention-mask design, decides how much of the seed checkpoint's capability survives. Starting from strong AR checkpoints with limited post-training data, FLARE matches leading open-source diffusion LLMs across scales and delivers consistent throughput gains in single-GPU concurrent serving.
S24 | Advancing Image Classification with Discrete Diffusion Classification Modeling
DiDiCM reframes image classification as discrete diffusion, modeling the posterior over class labels conditioned on the input image rather than predicting a label directly. Running the diffusion over class probabilities or over discrete labels lets you trade compute against memory. A few iterations already beat standard classifiers on ImageNet, and the gap widens as inputs grow corrupted or training data scarce.
Featured Videos
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How did diffusion LLMs get so fast?
Techniques for accelerating diffusion LLMs, from self-distillation and curriculum learning to KV caching and block diffusion
But How Do Diffusion Language Models Actually Work?
Jia-Bin Huang explores several ideas for applying diffusion models to language modeling
Simple Diffusion Language Models
Quick introduction to Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLM) by Alexander Rush
About the Reading Group
Diffusion LLMs are faster, more controllable successors to traditional LLMs and are rapidly gaining adoption. This reading group builds a community for exchanging and debating emerging ideas in this space. While our primary focus is discrete diffusion models for language, we also welcome work on other modalities and applications, such as molecular design, drug discovery, and beyond.
Meet the Organizers
Subham Sahoo
Holds a Ph.D. from Cornell Tech, where he specialized in Diffusion Language Models. He has made foundational contributions to the field, with his work deployed at scale by Google, NVIDIA, and ByteDance across language generation and drug discovery.
Justin Deschenaux
PhD student in Machine Learning at EPFL, advised by Prof. Caglar Gulcehre. Previously interned at Apple MLR. His research interests include diffusion language models, fast generative models, and generalization.
