Diffusion Language Models

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• Julianna Piskorz (University of Cambridge)
• Wednesday 29 October 2025, 11:00-12:30
• Cambridge University Engineering Department, CBL Seminar room BE4-38..

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Xianda Sun.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive paradigm for text generation. Unlike GPT -style models that generate text sequentially, DLMs employ an iterative denoising process that starts from a noisy representation and progressively reconstructs coherent text, enabling parallel token generation and bidirectional context modelling. While early research explored both continuous and discrete diffusion formulations for text, the discrete masked diffusion objectives have recently dominated the landscape, allowing DLMs to effectively scale to larger model sizes and achieve competitive perplexity on standard benchmarks, as evidenced by models such as LLaDA, Mercury, Gemini Diffusion or Seed Diffusion. MDL Ms have attracted a lot of attention for their potential to speed up inference through parallel decoding and improve controllability. In this talk, we will explore the formulation of DLMs, discuss their potential advantages and shortcomings, and dive into the most recent and influential works in this new area.

This talk is part of the Machine Learning Reading Group @ CUED series.

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