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Chenkai Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Chenkai Xu.

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CForce: Boosting Parallel Decoding for dLLMs via Consistency Forcing

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) accelerate language generation by predicting multiple masks in a single forward pass. However, existing dLLMs can suffer from unreliable predictions in early denoising stages under aggressive parallelism strategies, leading to errors that can propagate to later stages. To tackle this issue, we present Consistency Forcing (CForce) for dLLMs, a distillation method to force the mask predictions of early stages to align with those of later stages. CForce trains the model on pre-collected self-rollout trajectories, thereby improving training-inference alignment. We introduce Confidence Adaptive KL Divergence as a distillation objective to conjoin the merits of forward and reverse KL. We further provide a theoretical analysis for the consistency objective to explain why CForce can approximately minimize the prediction error of early stages. Critically, the same formulation applies to both mask-to-token decoding and edit-capable decoding; in the edit-capable case, later token-to-token refinements provide additional supervision for earlier masked-state predictions. Experiments on non-edit and edit-capable LLaDA models show improved speed-quality trade-offs, especially under high-parallelism decoding budgets. Code is available at: https://github.com/inclusionAI/dFactory.

cs.LG

Multi-Block Diffusion Language Models

Block Diffusion Language Models (BD-LMs) improve diffusion-based text generation with KV caching and flexible-length generation. A natural next step is to extend them from Single-Block Diffusion (SingleBD) to Multi-Block Diffusion (MultiBD), where a running-set of consecutive blocks is decoded concurrently for inter-block parallelism. However, existing BD-LMs are mostly trained under teacher forcing, where the model observes only one noisy block conditioned on a clean prefix. While the recent diffusion forcing strategy introduces visibility among multiple noisy blocks, its training states still differ from MultiBD inference, where decoding operates on a bounded running-set with heterogeneous slot-wise noise patterns. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Block Diffusion Language Models (MBD-LMs), obtained by post-training BD-LMs with Multi-block Teacher Forcing (MultiTF). MultiTF integrates teacher forcing and diffusion forcing by training on bounded noise-groups conditioned on clean prefixes, with randomized noise-schedulers that better match MultiBD inference states. To make MultiBD practically executable, we further introduce an optimized decoding algorithm based on the Block Buffer mechanism that preserves prefix-cache reuse, keeps input shapes static, and translates increased decoding parallelism into wall-clock acceleration. Empirically, MBD-LLaDA2-Mini increases average Tokens Per Forward pass (TPF) from 3.47 to 6.19 and improves average accuracy from 79.95% to 81.03%; when combined with DMax, MBD-LLaDA2-Mini-DMax reaches an average TPF of 9.34 with only a 1.02% accuracy drop on math and code benchmarks.

cs.LG

LoPA: Scaling dLLM Inference via Lookahead Parallel Decoding

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for high-speed inference. However, current confidence-driven decoding strategies are constrained by limited parallelism, typically achieving only 1--3 tokens per forward pass (TPF). In this work, we identify that the degree of parallelism during dLLM inference is highly sensitive to the Token Filling Order (TFO). Then, we introduce Lookahead PArallel Decoding LoPA, a training-free, plug-and-play algorithm, to identify a superior TFO and hence accelerate inference. LoPA concurrently explores distinct candidate TFOs via parallel branches, and selects the one with the highest potential for future parallelism based on branch confidence. We apply LoPA to the state-of-the-art D2F model and observe a substantial enhancement in decoding efficiency. Notably, LoPA increases the TPF of D2F-Dream to 10.1 on the GSM8K while maintaining performance superior to the Dream baseline. Furthermore, to facilitate this unprecedented degree of parallelism, we develop a specialized multi-device inference system featuring Branch Parallelism (BP), which achieves a single-sample throughput of 1073.9 tokens per second under multi-GPU deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/LoPA.

cs.CL

Diffusion LLMs Can Do Faster-Than-AR Inference via Discrete Diffusion Forcing

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs for text generation, with the potential to decode multiple tokens in a single iteration. However, none of the existing open-source dLLMs have achieved superior inference speed over AR LLMs of similar size. This paper breaks this barrier based on a simple and effective strategy named discrete diffusion forcing (D2F). D2F equips dLLMs with two key capabilities: (1) block-wise autoregressive generation to enable KV cache utilization; (2) prediction of following tokens without requiring completion of prior blocks for inter-block parallel decoding. In this way, the vanilla dLLMs are refurbished into an AR-diffusion hybrid paradigm for efficient inference. D2F can be implemented with an asymmetric distillation process based on pre-trained dLLMs. We further propose a pipelined parallel decoding algorithm, which enables a trade-off between efficiency and efficacy. Empirically, D2F dLLMs achieve more than $\mathbf{2.5\times}$ inference speed than LLaMA3 and Qwen2.5 on GSM8K. Compared to vanilla dLLMs like LLaDA and Dream, the acceleration can be more than $\mathbf{50\times}$ while maintaining comparable output quality. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/Discrete-Diffusion-Forcing.

cs.LG

UniCMs: A Unified Consistency Model For Efficient Multimodal Generation and Understanding

Consistency models (CMs) have shown promise in the efficient generation of both image and text. This raises the natural question of whether we can learn a unified CM for efficient multimodal generation (e.g., text-to-image) and understanding (e.g., image-to-text). Intuitively, such a model could be acquired by applying the consistency distillation (CD) to existing unified multimodal models. However, the key challenge is establishing a unified denoising perspective for both image and text generation, which is essential for establishing the consistency mapping. To tackle this, at the representation level, we advocate for discrete tokens for both modalities to best preserve language modeling capabilities. Critically, instead of defining the text denoising trajectory via recent discrete diffusion language modeling principles, we specify it using the parallel decoding trace of an autoregressive language model, benefiting from the latter's superior performance in general text generation tasks. The denoising trajectory of image tokens adheres to standard discrete diffusion. We train our unified consistency models (UniCMs) on these combined multimodal trajectories simultaneously with a unified objective. We introduce a trajectory segmentation strategy to further improve the training convergence. Empirically, in text-to-image generation, UniCMs outperform SD3 on GenEval, Image Reward, and CLIP Score metrics, while requiring only approximately ${1}/{8}$ of the sampling time. Meanwhile, in image-to-text generation, UniCMs surpass Show-o on the MMMU benchmark while being $1.5 \times$ faster at long-sequence generating speed. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/UniCMs.

cs.CV

Stochastic Geometric Iterative Method for Loop Subdivision Surface Fitting

In this paper, we propose a stochastic geometric iterative method to approximate the high-resolution 3D models by finite Loop subdivision surfaces. Given an input mesh as the fitting target, the initial control mesh is generated using the mesh simplification algorithm. Then, our method adjusts the control mesh iteratively to make its finite Loop subdivision surface approximates the input mesh. In each geometric iteration, we randomly select part of points on the subdivision surface to calculate the difference vectors and distribute the vectors to the control points. Finally, the control points are updated by adding the weighted average of these difference vectors. We prove the convergence of our method and verify it by demonstrating error curves in the experiment. In addition, compared with an existing geometric iterative method, our method has a faster fitting speed and higher fitting precision.

cs.GR

Manifold Feature Index: A novel index based on high-dimensional data simplification

In this paper, we propose a novel stock index model, namely the manifold feature(MF) index, to reflect the overall price activity of the entire stock market. Based on the theory of manifold learning, the researched stock dataset is assumed to be a low-dimensional manifold embedded in a higher-dimensional Euclidean space. After data preprocessing, its manifold structure and discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator(LBO) matrix are constructed. We propose a high-dimensional data feature detection method to detect feature points on the eigenvectors of LBO, and the stocks corresponding to these feature points are considered as the constituent stocks of the MF index. Finally, the MF index is generated by a weighted formula using the price and market capitalization of these constituents. The stock market studied in this research is the Shanghai Stock Exchange(SSE). We propose four metrics to compare the MF index series and the SSE index series (SSE 50, SSE 100, SSE 150, SSE 180 and SSE 380). From the perspective of data approximation, the results demonstrate that our indexes are closer to the stock market than the SSE index series. From the perspective of risk premium, MF indexes have higher stability and lower risk.

q-fin.ST

High-Dimensional Data Set Simplification by Laplace-Beltrami Operator

With the development of the Internet and other digital technologies, the speed of data generation has become considerably faster than the speed of data processing. Because big data typically contain massive redundant information, it is possible to significantly simplify a big data set while maintaining the key information it contains. In this paper, we develop a big data simplification method based on the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator (LBO). Specifically, given a data set that can be considered as an unorganized data point set in high-dimensional space, a discrete LBO defined on the big data set is constructed and its eigenvalues and eigenvectors are calculated. Then, the local extremum and the saddle points of the eigenfunctions are proposed to be the feature points of a data set in high-dimensional space, constituting a simplified data set. Moreover, we develop feature point detection methods for the functions defined on an unorganized data point set in high-dimensional space, and devise metrics for measuring the fidelity of the simplified data set to the original set. Finally, examples and applications are demonstrated to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods, demonstrating that data set simplification is a method for processing a maximum-sized data set using a limited data processing capability.

cs.CV