{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-diffusion-duality","title":"The Diffusion Duality","arxiv_id":"2506.10892","date":"2025-06-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Subham Sekhar Sahoo","Justin Deschenaux","Aaron Gokaslan","Guanghan Wang","Justin Chiu","Volodymyr Kuleshov"],"abstract":"Uniform-state discrete diffusion models hold the promise of fast text generation due to their inherent ability to self-correct. However, they are typically outperformed by autoregressive models and masked diffusion models. In this work, we narrow this performance gap by leveraging a key insight: Uniform-state diffusion processes naturally emerge from an underlying Gaussian diffusion. Our method, Duo, transfers powerful techniques from Gaussian diffusion to improve both training and sampling. First, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy guided by the Gaussian process, doubling training speed by reducing variance. Models trained with curriculum learning surpass autoregressive models in zero-shot perplexity on 3 of 7 benchmarks. Second, we present Discrete Consistency Distillation, which adapts consistency distillation from the continuous to the discrete setting. This algorithm unlocks few-step generation in diffusion language models by accelerating sampling by two orders of magnitude. We provide the code and model checkpoints on the project page: http://s-sahoo.github.io/duo","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10892v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10892v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-diffusion-duality","repo_url":"https://github.com/s-sahoo/duo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"diffusion","method_name":"Diffusion"},{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2506.10892","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2506.10892"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/s-sahoo/duo","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"community":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"9dcbdcf4fe815b37","entry":"parse_device","repo":"mit-han-lab/duo-attention","repo_kind":"community","path":"duo_attn/utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/mit-han-lab/duo-attention/blob/HEAD/duo_attn/utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"9dcbdcf4fe815b37"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}