Representation-based Masked Diffusion Model

arXiv:2609.12382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a compelling paradigm for language modeling, offering the capability for efficient parallel text generation. However, existing parallel sampling methods typically update multiple masked tokens independently and ignore the complex mutual dependencies among the masked tokens. This independent updating mechanism lacks global coordination and might lead to incoherent outputs. To address this limitation, we propose Representation-based Masked Diffusion Model (RMDM), a framework that leverages the text representation to explicitly encode global semantics and help to parallel update tokens more precisely. Specifically, we first encode text into a continuous semantic space using a pretrained encoder and learn an invertible transformation that normalizes the representation distribution to a Gaussian prior, facilitating efficient sampling during generation. Conditioned on this latent semantic representation, we train a masked diffusion model to learn the conditional text distribution, where the representation serves as global semantic guidance to coordinate parallel token updates and faithfully approximate the target distribution. Empirical results demonstrate that RMDM significantly improves generation quality, particularly in aggressive few-step sampling regimes.

Abstract:Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a compelling paradigm for language modeling, offering the capability for efficient parallel text generation. However, existing parallel sampling methods typically update multiple masked tokens independently and ignore the complex mutual dependencies among the masked tokens. This independent updating mechanism lacks global coordination and might lead to incoherent outputs. To address this limitation, we propose Representation-based Masked Diffusion Model (RMDM), a framework that leverages the text representation to explicitly encode global semantics and help to parallel update tokens more precisely. Specifically, we first encode text into a continuous semantic space using a pretrained encoder and learn an invertible transformation that normalizes the representation distribution to a Gaussian prior, facilitating efficient sampling during generation. Conditioned on this latent semantic representation, we train a masked diffusion model to learn the conditional text distribution, where the representation serves as global semantic guidance to coordinate parallel token updates and faithfully approximate the target distribution. Empirical results demonstrate that RMDM significantly improves generation quality, particularly in aggressive few-step sampling regimes.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

arXiv:2609.12382 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.12382v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.12382 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Representation-based Masked Diffusion Model

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