Flexible-length Text Infilling for Discrete Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Andrew, Sivakumar, Anushka, Tang, Chiawei, Thomas, Chris
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhang, Andrew
Sivakumar, Anushka
Tang, Chiawei
Thomas, Chris
author_facet Zhang, Andrew
Sivakumar, Anushka
Tang, Chiawei
Thomas, Chris
contents Discrete diffusion models are a new class of text generators that offer advantages such as bidirectional context use, parallelizable generation, and flexible prompting compared to autoregressive models. However, a critical limitation of discrete diffusion models is their inability to perform flexible-length or flexible-position text infilling without access to ground-truth positional data. We introduce \textbf{DDOT} (\textbf{D}iscrete \textbf{D}iffusion with \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{T}ransport Position Coupling), the first discrete diffusion model to overcome this challenge. DDOT jointly denoises token values and token positions, employing a novel sample-level Optimal Transport (OT) coupling. This coupling preserves relative token ordering while dynamically adjusting the positions and length of infilled segments, a capability previously missing in text diffusion. Our method is orthogonal to existing discrete text diffusion methods and is compatible with various pretrained text denoisers. Extensive experiments on text infilling benchmarks such as One-Billion-Word and Yelp demonstrate that DDOT outperforms naive diffusion baselines. Furthermore, DDOT achieves performance on par with state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models and enables significant improvements in training efficiency and flexibility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_13579
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flexible-length Text Infilling for Discrete Diffusion Models
Zhang, Andrew
Sivakumar, Anushka
Tang, Chiawei
Thomas, Chris
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Discrete diffusion models are a new class of text generators that offer advantages such as bidirectional context use, parallelizable generation, and flexible prompting compared to autoregressive models. However, a critical limitation of discrete diffusion models is their inability to perform flexible-length or flexible-position text infilling without access to ground-truth positional data. We introduce \textbf{DDOT} (\textbf{D}iscrete \textbf{D}iffusion with \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{T}ransport Position Coupling), the first discrete diffusion model to overcome this challenge. DDOT jointly denoises token values and token positions, employing a novel sample-level Optimal Transport (OT) coupling. This coupling preserves relative token ordering while dynamically adjusting the positions and length of infilled segments, a capability previously missing in text diffusion. Our method is orthogonal to existing discrete text diffusion methods and is compatible with various pretrained text denoisers. Extensive experiments on text infilling benchmarks such as One-Billion-Word and Yelp demonstrate that DDOT outperforms naive diffusion baselines. Furthermore, DDOT achieves performance on par with state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models and enables significant improvements in training efficiency and flexibility.
title Flexible-length Text Infilling for Discrete Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13579