Multi-Mask Diffusion Language Models for Few-Step Generation
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising family of language generators, but achieving high-quality few-step generation remains challenging. In MDMs, all forward trajectories collapse to a single fully masked state, leaving no terminal entropy for consistency-style few-step generation. While recent few-step alternatives based on uniform-state diffusion avoid this degeneracy, it becomes harder to distinguish clean tokens from noise than MDMs, which usually harms modeling quality and training efficiency. In this work, we propose a multi-mask diffusion model (MultiMDM) that preserves the masking structure towards few-step generation. In the forward process, each clean token is first pus...
| Authors | Sijin Chen, Yinuo Ren, Heyang Zhao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 September 2026 |
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