Flow models reach 99.2% Sudoku accuracy in 7 passes and 96.1% on out-of-distribution Sudoku-Extreme by selecting dynamically stable candidates and training with self-conditioning plus DPO to avoid failed outputs.
Flow Map Language Models: One-step Language Modeling via Continuous Denoising
11 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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Pith papers citing it
abstract
Language models based on discrete diffusion have attracted widespread interest for their potential to provide faster generation than autoregressive models. Despite their promise, these models typically produce samples whose quality sharply degrades in the few-step regime, preventing a dramatic speedup in practice. Here, we show that language models based on continuous flows over one-hot token embeddings can outperform discrete diffusion in both quality and speed. Importantly, our continuous formulation defines a unique flow map that can be learned directly for efficient few-step inference, a structure we show is unavailable to discrete methods. In this setting, we show that both the flow and its associated flow map can be learned with simple cross-entropy objectives that respect the simplex geometry of the data, and we identify three distinct choices for flow map distillation whose performance we compare in practice. Using these insights, we build a flow language model (FLM), a continuous flow that matches state-of-the-art discrete diffusion baselines on the One Billion Words (LM1B) and OpenWebText (OWT) datasets. We then distill FLM into a flow map language model (FMLM), whose one-step generation exceeds the 8-step quality of recent few-step discrete diffusion language models. Our work challenges the widely-held hypothesis that discrete noising processes are necessary for generative modeling over discrete modalities and paves the way toward accelerated language modeling at scale. Code is available at https://github.com/david3684/flm.
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2026 11representative citing papers
Continuous language diffusion works by entering high-margin decoder basins where frozen T5 embeddings recover 93-96% of native decisions and linear readouts reach 97.9% agreement, implying models should be evaluated as representation-decoder systems.
CDM amortizes SMC inference for reward-tilted discrete diffusion by training a parameterized twist function on contrastive samples with closed-form kernels.
TokenDrift refines discrete diffusion language models by applying anti-symmetric drifting to soft-token features during training, yielding large reductions in generation perplexity at low NFEs.
Marginal-conditioned bridges enable training-free sampling from Flow Language Models by drawing clean one-hot endpoints from factorized posteriors and using Ornstein-Uhlenbeck bridges, preserving token marginals and reducing denoising error versus conditional-mean bridges.
LangFlow is the first continuous diffusion language model to rival discrete diffusion on perplexity and generative perplexity while exceeding autoregressive baselines on several zero-shot tasks.
DiLaDiff augments masked diffusion LMs with latent space modeling and consistency distillation to improve token correlation capture and inference speed.
RePlaid achieves a 20x compute gap to autoregressive models, new SOTA PPL of 22.1 among continuous DLMs on OpenWebText, and competitive scaling laws by aligning architecture with modern discrete DLMs.
ELF applies continuous-time flow matching in embedding space for language generation and reports outperforming prior discrete and continuous diffusion language models with fewer steps.
Joint training of the latent space with the diffusion process produces a competitive latent diffusion language model that is faster than existing discrete and continuous diffusion baselines.
Coupling Models enable single-step discrete sequence generation via learned couplings to Gaussian latents and outperform prior one-step baselines on text perplexity, biological FBD, and image FID metrics.
citing papers explorer
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Flow Reasoning Models: Scaling Reasoning Through Iterative Self-Refinement
Flow models reach 99.2% Sudoku accuracy in 7 passes and 96.1% on out-of-distribution Sudoku-Extreme by selecting dynamically stable candidates and training with self-conditioning plus DPO to avoid failed outputs.
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Continuous Language Diffusion as a Decoder-Interface Problem
Continuous language diffusion works by entering high-margin decoder basins where frozen T5 embeddings recover 93-96% of native decisions and linear readouts reach 97.9% agreement, implying models should be evaluated as representation-decoder systems.
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Contrastive Distribution Matching for Amortized Sequential Monte Carlo in Discrete Diffusion
CDM amortizes SMC inference for reward-tilted discrete diffusion by training a parameterized twist function on contrastive samples with closed-form kernels.
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Drifting Objectives for Refining Discrete Diffusion Language Models
TokenDrift refines discrete diffusion language models by applying anti-symmetric drifting to soft-token features during training, yielding large reductions in generation perplexity at low NFEs.
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Sampling from Flow Language Models via Marginal-Conditioned Bridges
Marginal-conditioned bridges enable training-free sampling from Flow Language Models by drawing clean one-hot endpoints from factorized posteriors and using Ornstein-Uhlenbeck bridges, preserving token marginals and reducing denoising error versus conditional-mean bridges.
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LangFlow: Continuous Diffusion Rivals Discrete in Language Modeling
LangFlow is the first continuous diffusion language model to rival discrete diffusion on perplexity and generative perplexity while exceeding autoregressive baselines on several zero-shot tasks.
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DiLaDiff: Distilled Latent-Augmented Diffusion for Language Modeling
DiLaDiff augments masked diffusion LMs with latent space modeling and consistency distillation to improve token correlation capture and inference speed.
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Continuous Diffusion Scales Competitively with Discrete Diffusion for Language
RePlaid achieves a 20x compute gap to autoregressive models, new SOTA PPL of 22.1 among continuous DLMs on OpenWebText, and competitive scaling laws by aligning architecture with modern discrete DLMs.
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ELF: Embedded Language Flows
ELF applies continuous-time flow matching in embedding space for language generation and reports outperforming prior discrete and continuous diffusion language models with fewer steps.
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How to Train Your Latent Diffusion Language Model Jointly With the Latent Space
Joint training of the latent space with the diffusion process produces a competitive latent diffusion language model that is faster than existing discrete and continuous diffusion baselines.
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Coupling Models for One-Step Discrete Generation
Coupling Models enable single-step discrete sequence generation via learned couplings to Gaussian latents and outperform prior one-step baselines on text perplexity, biological FBD, and image FID metrics.