扩散语言模型可突破传统生成瓶颈,用少于文本长度的迭代次数实现高质量生成。
Breaking AR's Sampling Bottleneck: Provable Acceleration via Diffusion Language Models
- 从信息论角度分析扩散语言模型,证明采样误差随迭代次数递减。
- 理论表明在迭代次数少于序列长度时仍可生成高质量文本,打破传统瓶颈。
- 首次给出收敛性上下界,为扩散模型高效生成提供理论支撑,适合研究生成模型者阅读。
扩散模型已成为现代生成建模的强大范式,展现出与大语言模型结合的巨大潜力。与传统自回归(AR)模型逐个生成词元不同,扩散模型支持并行采样,有望加速生成过程并消除从左到右的生成限制。尽管其在实践中取得成功,但对扩散语言模型的理论理解仍不充分。本文从信息论视角建立了扩散语言模型的收敛性保证:采样误差(以KL散度衡量)随迭代次数$T$反比衰减,且与目标文本序列中词元间的互信息呈线性关系。关键在于,该理论覆盖了$T<L$的场景,其中$L$为文本序列长度。这说明高质量样本可在少于$L$次迭代内生成,从而打破自回归模型所需的$L$步采样瓶颈。我们进一步建立了匹配的上下界,证明分析的紧致性。这些结果为扩散语言模型的实际有效性提供了新颖的理论洞察。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for modern generative modeling, demonstrating strong potential for large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional autoregressive (AR) models that generate tokens sequentially, diffusion models allow for parallel sampling, offering a promising path to accelerate generation and eliminate the left-to-right generation constraints. Despite their empirical success, theoretical understandings of diffusion language models remain underdeveloped. In this work, we develop convergence guarantees for diffusion language models from an information-theoretic perspective. Our analysis demonstrates that the sampling error, measured by the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, decays inversely with the number of iterations $T$ and scales linearly with the mutual information between tokens in the target text sequence. Crucially, our theory covers the regime $T<L$, where $L$ is the text sequence length. This justifies that high-quality samples can be generated with fewer iterations than $L$, thereby breaking the fundamental sampling bottleneck of $L$ steps required by AR models. We further establish matching upper and lower bounds, up to some constant factor, that shows the tightness of our convergence analysis. These results offer novel theoretical insights into the practical effectiveness of diffusion language models.
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