The Diffusion Duality, Chapter II: $Ψ$-Samplers

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Deschenaux, Justin, Gulcehre, Caglar, Sahoo, Subham Sekhar
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914570828775424
author Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
Sahoo, Subham Sekhar
author_facet Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
Sahoo, Subham Sekhar
contents Uniform-state discrete diffusion models excel at few-step generation and guidance due to their ability to self-correct, making them preferred over autoregressive or Masked diffusion models in these settings. However, their sampling quality plateaus with ancestral samplers as the number of steps increases. We introduce a family of Predictor-Corrector (PC) samplers for discrete diffusion that generalize prior methods and apply to arbitrary noise processes. When paired with uniform-state diffusion, our samplers outperform ancestral sampling on both language and image modeling, achieving lower generative perplexity at matched unigram entropy on OpenWebText and better FID/IS scores on CIFAR10. Crucially, unlike conventional samplers, our PC methods continue to improve with more sampling steps. Taken together, these findings call into question the assumption that Masked diffusion is the inevitable future of diffusion-based language modeling. Beyond sampling, we develop a memory-efficient curriculum for the Gaussian relaxation training phase, reducing training time by 25% and memory by 33% compared to Duo while maintaining comparable perplexity on OpenWebText and LM1B and strong downstream performance. We release code, checkpoints, and a video-tutorial on: https://s-sahoo.com/duo-ch2
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21185
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Diffusion Duality, Chapter II: $Ψ$-Samplers
Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
Sahoo, Subham Sekhar
Machine Learning
Uniform-state discrete diffusion models excel at few-step generation and guidance due to their ability to self-correct, making them preferred over autoregressive or Masked diffusion models in these settings. However, their sampling quality plateaus with ancestral samplers as the number of steps increases. We introduce a family of Predictor-Corrector (PC) samplers for discrete diffusion that generalize prior methods and apply to arbitrary noise processes. When paired with uniform-state diffusion, our samplers outperform ancestral sampling on both language and image modeling, achieving lower generative perplexity at matched unigram entropy on OpenWebText and better FID/IS scores on CIFAR10. Crucially, unlike conventional samplers, our PC methods continue to improve with more sampling steps. Taken together, these findings call into question the assumption that Masked diffusion is the inevitable future of diffusion-based language modeling. Beyond sampling, we develop a memory-efficient curriculum for the Gaussian relaxation training phase, reducing training time by 25% and memory by 33% compared to Duo while maintaining comparable perplexity on OpenWebText and LM1B and strong downstream performance. We release code, checkpoints, and a video-tutorial on: https://s-sahoo.com/duo-ch2
title The Diffusion Duality, Chapter II: $Ψ$-Samplers
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21185