Masked Diffusion Models

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21 papers in the last four weeks, up 250% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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The data geometry of masking diffusion: Certified-optimal schedules via unmasking growth complexity
Aug 13, 2026Martin J. WainwrightMasked Diffusion Models Diffusion Sampling
Lab for Information and Decision Systems · Statistics and Data Science Center · EECS and Mathematics
Stoicheia: Character-Level Masked Diffusion for Ancient Greek Textual Restoration, Parsing, and Metrical Scansion
Aug 7, 2026Eric Cullhed, Albin Thörn ClelandMasked Diffusion Models Dependency Parsing
Department of Linguistics and Philology · Uppsala University · Sweden +2
Lost in Interpolation: Why Predictive Feedback Fails in Diffusion Language Models
Aug 6, 2026Lavanya Nigam, Ishaan Bansal, Aryan Sood +2Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Language Model Decoding
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India
Masked diffusion enables coherent beat tracking
Aug 5, 2026Francesco Foscarin, Filip Korzeniowski, Richard VoglMasked Diffusion Models Music Information Retrieval
Moises AI
MDLMPE: Distribution Aware Positional Encoding for Masked Diffusion Language Models
Aug 4, 2026Tong Ling, Hang Lei, Feng Xiao +5Rotary Positional Embeddings Masked Diffusion Models
University Chinese Academic of Science · HUJING Digital Media & Entertainment Group · State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China +1
EchoChange: A Diffusion Language Model with Dual Pass Remasking for Factual Remote Sensing Disaster Change Captioning
Aug 3, 2026Dongwei Sun, Bowen Yao, Yujie Zhang +3Remote Sensing Image Understanding Masked Diffusion Models
School of Computer Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education Key Lab for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi’an Jiaotong University, 710049, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China · State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100094, China
TongueReenact: Geometry-Anchored Tongue Synthesis for Face Reenactment
Jul 30, 2026MD Wahiduzzaman Khan, Mingshan Jia, Xiaolin Zhang +2Masked Diffusion Models
University of Technology Sydney, Australia · Shandong University of Science and Technology, China
From Interface to Inference: Eliciting Any-Order Inference from Any-Order Models
Jul 29, 2026Seunggeun Kim, Jaeyeon Kim, Taekyun Lee +4Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Language Model Inference
University of Texas at Austin · Harvard University
PreDiff-LM: Pretrained Discrete Masked Diffusion Language Modeling with Hybrid Attention
Jul 28, 2026Zhengtao Yao, Runhao Li, Xupeng Chen +12Masked Diffusion Models Attention Control in Diffusion Models
University of Southern California · New York University · Columbia University +4
Multi-Mask Diffusion Language Models for Few-Step Generation
Jul 22, 2026Sijin Chen, Yinuo Ren, Heyang Zhao +3Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Model Distillation
ByteDance Seed · Princeton University · Stanford University +2
MotifRole-Diff: Risk-Optimal Role-Aware Corruption for Masked Molecular Graph Diffusion
Jul 20, 2026Tasfia Nuzhat Ornee, Elias Hossain, Ivan Garibay +1Masked Diffusion Models Molecular Graph Generation
University of Central Florida
One-step lowest-variance selection in a Gaussian random-field model motivated by masked diffusion: Total correlation and a square root collision threshold
Jul 20, 2026Linjun LiMasked Diffusion Models Parallel Decoding
Department of Mathematics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Trace-Based On-Policy Distillation for Masked Diffusion Language Models
Jul 18, 2026Haolin Ren, Ziyang Huang, Chenhao Yuan +2Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Model Distillation
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Induction in Both Directions: A Mechanistic Analysis of In-Context Learning in Masked Diffusion Language Models
Jul 17, 2026Andy Catruna, Emilian RadoiMasked Diffusion Models In-Context Learning
National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest · Academy of Romanian Scientists
Adaptive Multi-Step Lookahead Decoding for Diffusion Language Models
Jul 17, 2026Yingqian Cui, Wei Deng, Lantao Mei +4Masked Diffusion Models Language Model Decoding
Michigan State University · Morgan Stanley · IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Mask-Aware Policy Gradients for Diffusion Language Models
Jul 16, 2026Haran Raajesh, Kulin Shah, Adam Klivans +1Masked Diffusion Models RL for Language Model Reasoning
Department of Computer Science The University of Texas at Austin
A Continuous-Time Reinforcement Learning Framework for Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models
Jul 16, 2026Zikun Zhang, Jiayuan Sheng, David D. Yao +1Masked Diffusion Models RL for Language Model Reasoning
Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027
Discrete Diffusion Models: A Unified Framework from Tokenization to Generation
Jul 15, 2026Ye Yuan, Weien Li, Rui Song +19Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Model Sampling
McGill University · University of Cambridge · Mila - Quebec AI Institute +6
Concurrent Image Understanding and Generation: Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processes
Jul 14, 2026Minh-Quan Le, Armand Comas, Alexandros Lattas +7Masked Diffusion Models Markov Models
Google · Stony Brook University · Google DeepMind
Accelerating Masked Diffusion Large Language Models: A Survey of Efficient Inference Techniques
Jul 14, 2026Daehoon Gwak, Minhyung Lee, Junwoo Park +1Masked Diffusion Models Inference-Time Scaling
KAIST AI · Yonsei University
Sticky Jump Diffusions: A Unifying View of Masked, Continuous, and Hybrid Diffusion
Jul 12, 2026Pascal Jutras-Dubé, Patrick Pynadath, Jeremy Lu +2Masked Diffusion Models Stochastic Differential Equations
Department of Computer Science Purdue University · Department of Mathematics Purdue University
MobiDiff: Semantic-Aware Multi-Channel Discrete Diffusion for Human Mobility Data Generation
Jul 9, 2026Rongchao Xu, Lin Jiang, Dahai Yu +5Masked Diffusion Models Synthetic Data Generation
Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida, USA · Rutgers University Piscataway, New Jersey, USA · University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California, USA
Tensor-Train Joint Modeling for Few-Step Discrete Diffusion
Jul 4, 2026Byoungkwon Kim, Minhyuk SungMasked Diffusion Models Tensor Decomposition
KAIST
TAG-DLM: Diffusion Language Models for Text-Attributed Graph Learning
Jun 30, 2026Lingjie Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Haobo Xu +3Masked Diffusion Models Link Prediction
UIUC · VISA
Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion-Image: Advancing Masked Discrete Diffusion for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
Jun 29, 2026Shufan Li, Greg Heinrich, Hanrong Ye +4Masked Diffusion Models T2I Diffusion Models
NVIDIA
Masked Diffusion Decoding as $x$ -Prediction Flow
Jun 27, 2026Weitian Wang, Lianlei Shan, Shubham Rai +2Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Language Model Decoding
Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany · University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China · Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
VGB for Masked Diffusion Model: Efficient Test-time Scaling for Reward Satisfaction and Sample Editing
Jun 26, 2026Kijung Jeon, Thuy-Duong Vuong, Molei TaoConstrained Generative Modeling Masked Diffusion Models
Georgia Tech · UCSD
Masked Language Flow Models
Jun 26, 2026Iskander Azangulov, Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi, Leo Zhang +2Masked Diffusion Models Instruction Following
Department of Statistics, University of Oxford
Speculative Refinement: A Hybrid Autoregressive Diffusion Decoding Strategy and Its Behavior Across Benchmarks
Jun 25, 2026Aditi Gupta, Neel Mishra, Kushagra Trivedi +1Masked Diffusion Models Language Model Generation Evaluation
IIIT Hyderabad, India · Microsoft
Improved Large Language Diffusion Models
Jun 24, 2026Shen Nie, Qiyang Min, Shaoxuan Xu +7Language Model Pretraining Masked Diffusion Models
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance · Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, MOE +1

Aug 13, 2026, cs.LGJ/K move · Enter open · S save

The data geometry of masking diffusion: Certified-optimal schedules via unmasking growth complexity

Martin J. Wainwright

Lab for Information and Decision Systems · Statistics and Data Science Center · EECS and Mathematics

Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Sampling Diffusion Timestep Scheduling Diffusion Model Acceleration

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We study masking diffusion for discrete sampling and introduce a path-resolved measure of data geometry called the \emph{unmasking growth complexity} ({\textsf{UGC}\xspace}). Its local increments directly control Kullback--Leibler (KL) discretization error, yielding a unified analysis of Bernoulli-subset and fixed-cardinality unmasking schemes. In log-reveal-odds coordinates, this structure yields optimized single-block and multi-block schedules, and quantifies the gains from adapting computational effort to data geometry. Crucially, we show how {\textsf{UGC}\xspace} increments can be estimated from samples via KL increments along coupled reveal trajectories. This leads to \emph{certified-optimal} samplers that achieve a prescribed KL error with high probability and iteration complexity within a constant factor of the corresponding oracle procedure. Collapsing the \ugc path yields the aggregate {\textsf{UGC}\xspace} mass, which connects to classical multivariate dependence measures and complexity measures from previous analyses of discrete diffusion. In the fine-partition limit, the squared integral of the square-root {\textsf{UGC}\xspace} density determines the sharp leading-order optimal Euler discretization error. Examples exhibit substantial dimension-dependent gains over coarse schedules, including

\widetildeΩ(\sqrt{d})

improvements achievable with a constant number of adaptively placed blocks.

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