Promises, Outlooks and Challenges of Diffusion Language Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Deschenaux, Justin, Gulcehre, Caglar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929415539130368
author Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
author_facet Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
contents The modern autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance on NLP benchmarks, and they are deployed in the real world. However, they still suffer from limitations of the autoregressive training paradigm. For example, autoregressive token generation is notably slow and can be prone to \textit{exposure bias}. The diffusion-based language models were proposed as an alternative to autoregressive generation to address some of these limitations. We evaluate the recently proposed Score Entropy Discrete Diffusion (SEDD) approach and show it is a promising alternative to autoregressive generation but it has some short-comings too. We empirically demonstrate the advantages and challenges of SEDD, and observe that SEDD generally matches autoregressive models in perplexity and on benchmarks such as HellaSwag, Arc or WinoGrande. Additionally, we show that in terms of inference latency, SEDD can be up to 4.5$\times$ more efficient than GPT-2. While SEDD allows conditioning on tokens at abitrary positions, SEDD appears slightly weaker than GPT-2 for conditional generation given short prompts. Finally, we reproduced the main results from the original SEDD paper.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Promises, Outlooks and Challenges of Diffusion Language Modeling
Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The modern autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance on NLP benchmarks, and they are deployed in the real world. However, they still suffer from limitations of the autoregressive training paradigm. For example, autoregressive token generation is notably slow and can be prone to \textit{exposure bias}. The diffusion-based language models were proposed as an alternative to autoregressive generation to address some of these limitations. We evaluate the recently proposed Score Entropy Discrete Diffusion (SEDD) approach and show it is a promising alternative to autoregressive generation but it has some short-comings too. We empirically demonstrate the advantages and challenges of SEDD, and observe that SEDD generally matches autoregressive models in perplexity and on benchmarks such as HellaSwag, Arc or WinoGrande. Additionally, we show that in terms of inference latency, SEDD can be up to 4.5$\times$ more efficient than GPT-2. While SEDD allows conditioning on tokens at abitrary positions, SEDD appears slightly weaker than GPT-2 for conditional generation given short prompts. Finally, we reproduced the main results from the original SEDD paper.
title Promises, Outlooks and Challenges of Diffusion Language Modeling
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11473