Temporal Self-Distillation: Faster Inference in Discrete Diffusion Language Models

Abstract:Diffusion language models (dLLMs) promise fast inference by generating multiple tokens in parallel, but suffer severe performance degradation when parallel decoding is pushed too aggressively. We introduce Temporal Self-Distillation (TSD), a simple on-policy method that trains dLLMs for fast inference by distilling predictions across time. Specifically, TSD distills the model's denoising distribution at earlier timesteps toward its distribution at the final timestep at which a token is committed. This encourages earlier predictions to better anticipate the model's eventual output, enabling much more aggressive parallel decoding. Because its teacher signal comes from the model itself, TSD requires no offline teacher generation and applies seamlessly to both base and post-trained policies. Across seven benchmarks in mathematics, planning, and code, TSD substantially shifts the speed--quality frontier toward the low-compute regime. TSD thus provides a simple, single-stage approach to accelerating dLLMs, achieving speedups competitive with offline distillation while avoiding a complex two-stage pipeline.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.15177 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.15177v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15177 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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