ResearchResearch paperLarge Language Models1 source · Oct 19, 2026

Diffusion Language Models Change Speed Across Tasks and Languages

Diffusion language models can write several tokens in one forward pass, and they decide during generation how many passes to spend.

Key points

  • To understand the underlying factors of this cost variation, we analyze two diffusion models across 10 tasks.
  • We find that the number of forward passes per token depends heavily on the task.
  • In multilingual generation, we find that highly tokenized languages also require more passes per token, adding to the cost they already pay with more tokens.
  • Taken together, our results show that diffusion's computational advantage depends on how much of the output is already determined, while its decoding effort offers a practical signal for making inference more efficient and reliable.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Diffusion Language Models Change Speed Across Tasks and Languages
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 05:47 AM
    Diffusion language models can write several tokens in one forward pass, and they decide during generation how many passes to spend.
    To understand the underlying factors of this cost variation, we analyze two diffusion models across 10 tasks.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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