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Auteurs principaux: Olausson, Theo X., Jazbec, Metod, Wang, Xi, Solar-Lezama, Armando, Naesseth, Christian A., Mandt, Stephan, Nalisnick, Eric
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09921
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author Olausson, Theo X.
Jazbec, Metod
Wang, Xi
Solar-Lezama, Armando
Naesseth, Christian A.
Mandt, Stephan
Nalisnick, Eric
author_facet Olausson, Theo X.
Jazbec, Metod
Wang, Xi
Solar-Lezama, Armando
Naesseth, Christian A.
Mandt, Stephan
Nalisnick, Eric
contents Much work has been done on designing fast and accurate sampling for diffusion language models (dLLMs). However, these efforts have largely focused on the tradeoff between speed and quality of individual samples; how to additionally ensure diversity across samples remains less well understood. In this work, we show that diversity can be increased by using softened, tempered versions of familiar confidence-based remasking heuristics, retaining their computational benefits and offering simple implementations. We motivate this approach by introducing an idealized formal model of fork tokens and studying the impact of remasking on the expected entropy at the forks. Empirically, the proposed tempered heuristics close the exploration gap (pass@k) between existing confidence-based and autoregressive sampling, hence outperforming both when controlling for cost (pass@NFE). We further study how the increase in diversity translates to downstream post-training and test-time compute scaling. Overall, our findings demonstrate that simple, efficient, and diverse sampling from dLLMs is possible.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_09921
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Tale of Two Temperatures: Simple, Efficient, and Diverse Sampling from Diffusion Language Models
Olausson, Theo X.
Jazbec, Metod
Wang, Xi
Solar-Lezama, Armando
Naesseth, Christian A.
Mandt, Stephan
Nalisnick, Eric
Machine Learning
Much work has been done on designing fast and accurate sampling for diffusion language models (dLLMs). However, these efforts have largely focused on the tradeoff between speed and quality of individual samples; how to additionally ensure diversity across samples remains less well understood. In this work, we show that diversity can be increased by using softened, tempered versions of familiar confidence-based remasking heuristics, retaining their computational benefits and offering simple implementations. We motivate this approach by introducing an idealized formal model of fork tokens and studying the impact of remasking on the expected entropy at the forks. Empirically, the proposed tempered heuristics close the exploration gap (pass@k) between existing confidence-based and autoregressive sampling, hence outperforming both when controlling for cost (pass@NFE). We further study how the increase in diversity translates to downstream post-training and test-time compute scaling. Overall, our findings demonstrate that simple, efficient, and diverse sampling from dLLMs is possible.
title A Tale of Two Temperatures: Simple, Efficient, and Diverse Sampling from Diffusion Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09921