DiffuMamba: High-Throughput Diffusion LMs with Mamba Backbone

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Singh, Vaibhav, Ostapenko, Oleksiy, Noël, Pierre-André, Belilovsky, Eugene, Scholak, Torsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Singh, Vaibhav
Ostapenko, Oleksiy
Noël, Pierre-André
Belilovsky, Eugene
Scholak, Torsten
author_facet Singh, Vaibhav
Ostapenko, Oleksiy
Noël, Pierre-André
Belilovsky, Eugene
Scholak, Torsten
contents Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, yet their reliance on Transformer backbones limits inference efficiency due to quadratic attention or KV-cache overhead. We introduce DiffuMamba, a masked diffusion language model built on a bidirectional Mamba backbone that combines the diffusion objective with linear-time sequence modeling, and DiffuMamba-H, a hybrid variant with interleaved attention. Across scales up to 1.3B parameters, our models match Transformer-based diffusion in downstream performance while achieving up to 8.2x and 4.3x higher inference throughput, respectively, on long sequences. We further present a systematic analysis of inference efficiency across modern DLM variants combining asymptotic complexity with empirical measurements. Notably, cache-efficient block diffusion with Mamba mixers emerges as the only strategy that scales linearly with sequence length and achieves the strongest performance across all baselines, suggesting a promising direction for future diffusion-based generation systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15927
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiffuMamba: High-Throughput Diffusion LMs with Mamba Backbone
Singh, Vaibhav
Ostapenko, Oleksiy
Noël, Pierre-André
Belilovsky, Eugene
Scholak, Torsten
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, yet their reliance on Transformer backbones limits inference efficiency due to quadratic attention or KV-cache overhead. We introduce DiffuMamba, a masked diffusion language model built on a bidirectional Mamba backbone that combines the diffusion objective with linear-time sequence modeling, and DiffuMamba-H, a hybrid variant with interleaved attention. Across scales up to 1.3B parameters, our models match Transformer-based diffusion in downstream performance while achieving up to 8.2x and 4.3x higher inference throughput, respectively, on long sequences. We further present a systematic analysis of inference efficiency across modern DLM variants combining asymptotic complexity with empirical measurements. Notably, cache-efficient block diffusion with Mamba mixers emerges as the only strategy that scales linearly with sequence length and achieves the strongest performance across all baselines, suggesting a promising direction for future diffusion-based generation systems.
title DiffuMamba: High-Throughput Diffusion LMs with Mamba Backbone
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15927