BERT Is Already a Denoiser: Cheaply Unlocking Iterative Generation in Masked Language Models
Masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT are typically used for representation learning despite their denoising pretraining. We test whether this capability supports conditional generation without diffusion training. Our decoder repeatedly predicts masked tokens and commits high-confidence predictions using a cosine schedule. It requires no diffusion timestep or reverse-diffusion objective. Frozen BERT already exhibits substantial denoising capability, reconstructing 61.0%, 37.5%, and 24.4% of masked tokens at 15%, 45%, and 60% corruption, respectively, although generation deteriorates sharply as visible context disappears. This capability alone does not yield task-directed generation: ...
| Authors | Julio C. Amador Diaz Lopez |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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