arXiv subjects

Lingjie Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Lingjie Chen.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Unlocking Lossless Speedups in LLMs via Discrete Diffusion

Large Language Models (LLMs) owe much of their success to next-token prediction (NTP), but their autoregressive (AR) structure requires slow, sequential token generation. To overcome this bottleneck, we introduce diffusion-augmented LLMs, a new class of models that defines an AR model distribution while using diffusion to draw multiple tokens in parallel from that distribution. We decouple the parameters of these models into two sets: AR weights, trained using the standard NTP objective, and lightweight diffusion weights, trained to generate multiple tokens simultaneously. The diffusion weights are learned through a simple Diffusion Distillation phase that adds negligible overhead to existing LLM training pipelines. We also introduce $Ψ$-Spec, a family of samplers that enables lossless acceleration and inference-time scaling at a fixed context length. Unlike speculative decoding, our method requires no separate draft model. Unlike diffusion LLMs (d-LLMs), it accelerates generation without sacrificing the quality of the underlying AR model. The resulting models, called Uno, can be trained from scratch or built by augmenting existing open-weight AR LLMs. Uno achieves higher throughput than leading speculative-decoding methods at every evaluated batch size and delivers up to $3\times$ speedups over the base AR model, including at the largest batch size supported by the device. Notably, our 8B Uno model outperforms the leading open d-LLM, the 26B DiffusionGemma, and the proprietary Mercury 2 across all evaluated benchmarks in agentic tool use, coding, and long-context reasoning. We release code and checkpoints at: https://s-sahoo.github.io/uno/

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the auto-regressive paradigm. With bidirectional attention and any-order generation, DLMs naturally fit infilling tasks, which require generating a middle span conditioned on both the prefix and the suffix. However, infilling is sensitive to the length of the span, while DLMs require the length to be fixed before generation. Although prior studies extend DLMs to dynamic lengths, they still suffer from two limitations. (i) Sensitivity to initial length. These methods require a preset length to initialize the search and are highly sensitive to this initial length, often yielding suboptimal results. (ii) Inference inefficiency. They either insert length-changing operations during generation or repeatedly search for an appropriate length using multi-step denoising confidence, both of which introduce substantial extra forward passes and computational cost. Therefore, we propose PILL (Probing-based InfiLling with preset-Length-free decoding), an efficient infilling method for DLMs that requires no preset initial length and adds far fewer extra forward passes than baselines, substantially reducing inference time. Experiments show that, across five DLMs spanning different families, architectures, and training recipes on eight infilling benchmarks, PILL improves over the strongest baseline by +4.8 average pass rate on code and +6.0 BLEU-2 on text, while running 1.82x faster than that baseline. The code is available at https://github.com/Hsu1023/PILL.

cs.CL↗