Constrained Discrete Diffusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Cardei, Michael, Christopher, Jacob K, Hartvigsen, Thomas, Kailkhura, Bhavya, Fioretto, Ferdinando
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Cardei, Michael
Christopher, Jacob K
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Kailkhura, Bhavya
Fioretto, Ferdinando
author_facet Cardei, Michael
Christopher, Jacob K
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Kailkhura, Bhavya
Fioretto, Ferdinando
contents Discrete diffusion models are a class of generative models that construct sequences by progressively denoising samples from a categorical noise distribution. Beyond their rapidly growing ability to generate coherent natural language, these models present a new and important opportunity to enforce sequence-level constraints, a capability that current autoregressive models cannot natively provide. This paper capitalizes on this opportunity by introducing Constrained Discrete Diffusion (CDD), a novel integration of differentiable constraint optimization within the diffusion process to ensure adherence to constraints, logic rules, or safety requirements for generated sequences. Unlike conventional text generators that often rely on post-hoc filtering or model retraining for controllable generation, CDD directly imposes constraints into the discrete diffusion sampling process, resulting in a training-free and effective approach. Experiments in toxicity-controlled text generation, property-constrained molecule design, and instruction-constrained text completion demonstrate that CDD achieves zero constraint violations in a diverse array of tasks while preserving fluency, novelty, and coherence while outperforming autoregressive and existing discrete diffusion approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09790
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Constrained Discrete Diffusion
Cardei, Michael
Christopher, Jacob K
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Kailkhura, Bhavya
Fioretto, Ferdinando
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Discrete diffusion models are a class of generative models that construct sequences by progressively denoising samples from a categorical noise distribution. Beyond their rapidly growing ability to generate coherent natural language, these models present a new and important opportunity to enforce sequence-level constraints, a capability that current autoregressive models cannot natively provide. This paper capitalizes on this opportunity by introducing Constrained Discrete Diffusion (CDD), a novel integration of differentiable constraint optimization within the diffusion process to ensure adherence to constraints, logic rules, or safety requirements for generated sequences. Unlike conventional text generators that often rely on post-hoc filtering or model retraining for controllable generation, CDD directly imposes constraints into the discrete diffusion sampling process, resulting in a training-free and effective approach. Experiments in toxicity-controlled text generation, property-constrained molecule design, and instruction-constrained text completion demonstrate that CDD achieves zero constraint violations in a diverse array of tasks while preserving fluency, novelty, and coherence while outperforming autoregressive and existing discrete diffusion approaches.
title Constrained Discrete Diffusion
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09790