Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guo, Hongcan, Zhao, Qinyu, Zhao, Yian, Nie, Shen, Zhu, Rui, Guo, Qiushan, Wang, Feng, Yang, Tao, Zhao, Hengshuang, Wei, Guoqiang, Zeng, Yan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Guo, Hongcan
Zhao, Qinyu
Zhao, Yian
Nie, Shen
Zhu, Rui
Guo, Qiushan
Wang, Feng
Yang, Tao
Zhao, Hengshuang
Wei, Guoqiang
Zeng, Yan
author_facet Guo, Hongcan
Zhao, Qinyu
Zhao, Yian
Nie, Shen
Zhu, Rui
Guo, Qiushan
Wang, Feng
Yang, Tao
Zhao, Hengshuang
Wei, Guoqiang
Zeng, Yan
contents Large language models have achieved remarkable success under the autoregressive paradigm, yet high-quality text generation need not be tied to a fixed left-to-right order. Existing alternatives still struggle to jointly achieve generation efficiency, scalable representation learning, and effective global semantic modeling. We propose Cola DLM, a hierarchical latent diffusion language model that frames text generation through hierarchical information decomposition. Cola DLM first learns a stable text-to-latent mapping with a Text VAE, then models a global semantic prior in continuous latent space with a block-causal DiT, and finally generates text through conditional decoding. From a unified Markov-path perspective, its diffusion process performs latent prior transport rather than token-level observation recovery, thereby separating global semantic organization from local textual realization. This design yields a more flexible non-autoregressive inductive bias, supports semantic compression and prior fitting in continuous space, and naturally extends to other continuous modalities. Through experiments spanning 4 research questions, 8 benchmarks, strictly matched ~2B-parameter autoregressive and LLaDA baselines, and scaling curves up to about 2000 EFLOPs, we identify an effective overall configuration of Cola DLM and verify its strong scaling behavior for text generation. Taken together, the results establish hierarchical continuous latent prior modeling as a principled alternative to strictly token-level language modeling, where generation quality and scaling behavior may better reflect model capability than likelihood, while also suggesting a concrete path toward unified modeling across discrete text and continuous modalities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06548
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model
Guo, Hongcan
Zhao, Qinyu
Zhao, Yian
Nie, Shen
Zhu, Rui
Guo, Qiushan
Wang, Feng
Yang, Tao
Zhao, Hengshuang
Wei, Guoqiang
Zeng, Yan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T50, 68T07
I.2.7; I.2.6
Large language models have achieved remarkable success under the autoregressive paradigm, yet high-quality text generation need not be tied to a fixed left-to-right order. Existing alternatives still struggle to jointly achieve generation efficiency, scalable representation learning, and effective global semantic modeling. We propose Cola DLM, a hierarchical latent diffusion language model that frames text generation through hierarchical information decomposition. Cola DLM first learns a stable text-to-latent mapping with a Text VAE, then models a global semantic prior in continuous latent space with a block-causal DiT, and finally generates text through conditional decoding. From a unified Markov-path perspective, its diffusion process performs latent prior transport rather than token-level observation recovery, thereby separating global semantic organization from local textual realization. This design yields a more flexible non-autoregressive inductive bias, supports semantic compression and prior fitting in continuous space, and naturally extends to other continuous modalities. Through experiments spanning 4 research questions, 8 benchmarks, strictly matched ~2B-parameter autoregressive and LLaDA baselines, and scaling curves up to about 2000 EFLOPs, we identify an effective overall configuration of Cola DLM and verify its strong scaling behavior for text generation. Taken together, the results establish hierarchical continuous latent prior modeling as a principled alternative to strictly token-level language modeling, where generation quality and scaling behavior may better reflect model capability than likelihood, while also suggesting a concrete path toward unified modeling across discrete text and continuous modalities.
title Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T50, 68T07
I.2.7; I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06548