Latent-Augmented Discrete Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shariatian, Dario, Durmus, Alain, Simsekli, Umut, Peluchetti, Stefano
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Shariatian, Dario
Durmus, Alain
Simsekli, Umut
Peluchetti, Stefano
author_facet Shariatian, Dario
Durmus, Alain
Simsekli, Umut
Peluchetti, Stefano
contents Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of models and a promising route to fast language generation, but practical implementations typically rely on factored reverse transitions ignoring cross-token dependencies and degrading few-step performance. We propose Latent-Augmented Discrete Diffusion (LADD), which introduces a learnable auxiliary latent channel and performs diffusion over the joint (token, latent) space. The latent variables provide an intermediate representation expressing joint structure while preserving tractable parameterizations. We instantiate LADD with continuous latents (Co-LADD) and discrete latents (Di-LADD), and study two inference schedules: a joint diffusion that denoises data and latents together, and a sequential diffusion that first resolves latents and then samples tokens conditionally. We derive ELBO-style objectives and analyze design choices that balance latent expressivity with diffusion compatibility. In experiments, LADD models yield improvements on unconditional generation metrics as compared to state-of-the-art masked discrete diffusion baselines, and are effective at lower sampling budgets, where unmasking many tokens per step is desirable.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18114
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Latent-Augmented Discrete Diffusion Models
Shariatian, Dario
Durmus, Alain
Simsekli, Umut
Peluchetti, Stefano
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of models and a promising route to fast language generation, but practical implementations typically rely on factored reverse transitions ignoring cross-token dependencies and degrading few-step performance. We propose Latent-Augmented Discrete Diffusion (LADD), which introduces a learnable auxiliary latent channel and performs diffusion over the joint (token, latent) space. The latent variables provide an intermediate representation expressing joint structure while preserving tractable parameterizations. We instantiate LADD with continuous latents (Co-LADD) and discrete latents (Di-LADD), and study two inference schedules: a joint diffusion that denoises data and latents together, and a sequential diffusion that first resolves latents and then samples tokens conditionally. We derive ELBO-style objectives and analyze design choices that balance latent expressivity with diffusion compatibility. In experiments, LADD models yield improvements on unconditional generation metrics as compared to state-of-the-art masked discrete diffusion baselines, and are effective at lower sampling budgets, where unmasking many tokens per step is desirable.
title Latent-Augmented Discrete Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18114