TextLDM: Language Modeling with Continuous Latent Diffusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiang, Jiaxiu, Ren, Jingjing, Li, Wenbo, Wang, Bo, Sun, Haoze, Yang, Yijun, Liu, Jianhui, Zhang, Yanbing, Zheng, Shenghe, Zhang, Yuan, Huang, Haoyang, Duan, Nan, Zuo, Wangmeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Jiang, Jiaxiu
Ren, Jingjing
Li, Wenbo
Wang, Bo
Sun, Haoze
Yang, Yijun
Liu, Jianhui
Zhang, Yanbing
Zheng, Shenghe
Zhang, Yuan
Huang, Haoyang
Duan, Nan
Zuo, Wangmeng
author_facet Jiang, Jiaxiu
Ren, Jingjing
Li, Wenbo
Wang, Bo
Sun, Haoze
Yang, Yijun
Liu, Jianhui
Zhang, Yanbing
Zheng, Shenghe
Zhang, Yuan
Huang, Haoyang
Duan, Nan
Zuo, Wangmeng
contents Diffusion Transformers (DiT) trained with flow matching in a VAE latent space have unified visual generation across images and videos. A natural next step toward a single architecture for both generation (visual synthesis) and understanding (text generation) is to apply this framework to language modeling. We propose TextLDM, which transfers the visual latent diffusion recipe to text generation with minimal architectural modification. A Transformer-based VAE maps discrete tokens to continuous latents, enhanced by Representation Alignment (REPA) with a frozen pretrained language model to produce representations effective for conditional denoising. A standard DiT then performs flow matching in this latent space, identical in architecture to its visual counterpart. The central challenge we address is obtaining high-quality continuous text representations: we find that reconstruction fidelity alone is insufficient, and that aligning latent features with a pretrained language model via REPA is critical for downstream generation quality. Trained from scratch on OpenWebText2, TextLDM substantially outperforms prior diffusion language models and matches GPT-2 under the same settings. Our results establish that the visual DiT recipe transfers effectively to language, taking a concrete step toward unified diffusion architectures for multimodal generation and understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07748
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TextLDM: Language Modeling with Continuous Latent Diffusion
Jiang, Jiaxiu
Ren, Jingjing
Li, Wenbo
Wang, Bo
Sun, Haoze
Yang, Yijun
Liu, Jianhui
Zhang, Yanbing
Zheng, Shenghe
Zhang, Yuan
Huang, Haoyang
Duan, Nan
Zuo, Wangmeng
Computation and Language
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) trained with flow matching in a VAE latent space have unified visual generation across images and videos. A natural next step toward a single architecture for both generation (visual synthesis) and understanding (text generation) is to apply this framework to language modeling. We propose TextLDM, which transfers the visual latent diffusion recipe to text generation with minimal architectural modification. A Transformer-based VAE maps discrete tokens to continuous latents, enhanced by Representation Alignment (REPA) with a frozen pretrained language model to produce representations effective for conditional denoising. A standard DiT then performs flow matching in this latent space, identical in architecture to its visual counterpart. The central challenge we address is obtaining high-quality continuous text representations: we find that reconstruction fidelity alone is insufficient, and that aligning latent features with a pretrained language model via REPA is critical for downstream generation quality. Trained from scratch on OpenWebText2, TextLDM substantially outperforms prior diffusion language models and matches GPT-2 under the same settings. Our results establish that the visual DiT recipe transfers effectively to language, taking a concrete step toward unified diffusion architectures for multimodal generation and understanding.
title TextLDM: Language Modeling with Continuous Latent Diffusion
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07748