Pith. sign in

REVIEW 9 cited by

Dimathtt{[M]}O: Distilling Masked Diffusion Models into One-step Generator

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2503.15457 v1 pith:RSQTYLRL submitted 2025-03-19 cs.CV cs.AIcs.LG

Dimathtt{[M]}O: Distilling Masked Diffusion Models into One-step Generator

classification cs.CV cs.AIcs.LG
keywords diffusionmaskedmathttmodelsone-stepdistributiongenerationdistillation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique. Despite their remarkable results, they typically suffer from slow inference with several steps. In this paper, we propose Di$\mathtt{[M]}$O, a novel approach that distills masked diffusion models into a one-step generator. Di$\mathtt{[M]}$O addresses two key challenges: (1) the intractability of using intermediate-step information for one-step generation, which we solve through token-level distribution matching that optimizes model output logits by an 'on-policy framework' with the help of an auxiliary model; and (2) the lack of entropy in the initial distribution, which we address through a token initialization strategy that injects randomness while maintaining similarity to teacher training distribution. We show Di$\mathtt{[M]}$O's effectiveness on both class-conditional and text-conditional image generation, impressively achieving performance competitive to multi-step teacher outputs while drastically reducing inference time. To our knowledge, we are the first to successfully achieve one-step distillation of masked diffusion models and the first to apply discrete distillation to text-to-image generation, opening new paths for efficient generative modeling.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Large Language Diffusion Models

    cs.CL 2025-02 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    LLaDA is a scalable diffusion-based language model that matches autoregressive LLMs like LLaMA3 8B on tasks and surpasses GPT-4o on reversal poem completion.

  2. Demystifying MaskGIT Sampler and Beyond: Adaptive Order Selection in Masked Diffusion

    cs.LG 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Theoretical analysis reveals MaskGIT's implicit temperature sampling in masked diffusion; proposes equivalent moment sampler and efficiency techniques for adaptive unmasking with image and text experiments.

  3. Accelerating Discrete Diffusion Models with Parallel-In-Time Sampling

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A parallel-in-time τ-leaping sampler for absorbing discrete diffusion models is introduced, with an exponential-factorial convergence proof and empirical speedups of 7-9× on synthetic tasks and 1.45-1.86× on image/tex...

  4. BlockGen: Flexible Blockwise Sequence Modeling with Hybrid Samplers

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BlockGen enables flexible blockwise diffusion modeling with mixed block sizes and ARPC sampling, finding uniform diffusion outperforms masked under ancestral sampling in few-step regimes while the gap reverses with AR...

  5. Fixed-Point Masked Generative Modeling

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FP-MGMs with consistency loss and three-state reuse (CoFRe) reduce parameters by up to 38.8% and improve low-budget perplexity and FID versus standard masked generative models on text and images.

  6. Coupling Models for One-Step Discrete Generation

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    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.

  7. Gumbel Distillation for Parallel Text Generation

    cs.CL 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    Conditioning parallel decoders on Gumbel noise sampled from an autoregressive teacher's Gumbel-Max process improves generation quality on LM1B and OpenWebText.

  8. IDLM: Inverse-distilled Diffusion Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-02 reject novelty 6.0

    IDLM distills pretrained discrete diffusion language models into few-step generators, cutting inference steps by 4–64× with roughly matched GenPPL and entropy.

  9. Discrete Diffusion Models: A Unified Framework from Tokenization to Generation

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Discrete diffusion models are re-framed as instances of a tokenization-centric, four-component design space (corruption, denoiser, objective, sampler) in a broad survey with no new experimental or theoretical results.