Coupling Models for One-Step Discrete Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Peng, Fred Zhangzhi, Bose, Avishek Joey, Zhang, Anru R., Tong, Alexander
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911661448757248
author Peng, Fred Zhangzhi
Bose, Avishek Joey
Zhang, Anru R.
Tong, Alexander
author_facet Peng, Fred Zhangzhi
Bose, Avishek Joey
Zhang, Anru R.
Tong, Alexander
contents Generative modeling over discrete structures underpins applications across deep learning, from biological sequence design and code generation to large language models, yet generation often remains sequential, relying on autoregressive decoding or iterative refinement. In this work, we introduce Coupling Models(Coupling Models), a one-step discrete generative model that learns a direct coupling between discrete sequences and Gaussian latents. Unlike recent distillation methods that compress a pretrained multi-step sampler into a few steps, Coupling Model trains a purpose-built decoder to invert this coupling and generate samples in a single step. The model also avoids complex continuous flows over the simplex and hand-specified data-to-noise couplings. Empirically,Coupling Model improves the strongest one-step baselines in each domain: it reduces LM1B text-generation perplexity by 33% at its lowest-perplexity operating point, Fly Brain enhancer-design FBD by 18%, and MNIST-Binary FID by 46%. These results suggest that effective one-step discrete generation depends strongly on how data and noise are coupled before decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/pengzhangzhi/Coupling-Models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07193
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Coupling Models for One-Step Discrete Generation
Peng, Fred Zhangzhi
Bose, Avishek Joey
Zhang, Anru R.
Tong, Alexander
Machine Learning
Generative modeling over discrete structures underpins applications across deep learning, from biological sequence design and code generation to large language models, yet generation often remains sequential, relying on autoregressive decoding or iterative refinement. In this work, we introduce Coupling Models(Coupling Models), a one-step discrete generative model that learns a direct coupling between discrete sequences and Gaussian latents. Unlike recent distillation methods that compress a pretrained multi-step sampler into a few steps, Coupling Model trains a purpose-built decoder to invert this coupling and generate samples in a single step. The model also avoids complex continuous flows over the simplex and hand-specified data-to-noise couplings. Empirically,Coupling Model improves the strongest one-step baselines in each domain: it reduces LM1B text-generation perplexity by 33% at its lowest-perplexity operating point, Fly Brain enhancer-design FBD by 18%, and MNIST-Binary FID by 46%. These results suggest that effective one-step discrete generation depends strongly on how data and noise are coupled before decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/pengzhangzhi/Coupling-Models.
title Coupling Models for One-Step Discrete Generation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07193