纠正扩散语言模型的自回归倾向,实现真正并行生成。
Why Diffusion Language Models Struggle with Truly Parallel (Non-Autoregressive) Decoding?
- 用多独立推理路径数据+强制并行解码,对齐训练目标与并行生成。
- 在数学推理任务中,并行度越高,性能提升越明显,超越传统扩散模型。
- 适合追求低延迟、高并行效率的生成系统研发者参考。
扩散语言模型(DLMs)常被宣传可实现并行生成,但实际应用中往往收敛到类似自回归(AR)的左到右解码模式。真正的非自回归(non-AR)生成能消除序列瓶颈,更高效利用并行硬件,降低同步开销并改善长输出时的延迟扩展。我们指出,其主要原因是训练目标与数据中高度顺序结构之间的不匹配,包括标准预训练语料和长链式思维(CoT)监督数据。为此,我们提出NAP(Non-Autoregressive Parallel DLMs),一种以数据为中心的原型方法:将样本重构为多个独立推理轨迹,并结合强制并行解码策略,促进多标记并行更新。在数学推理基准上,与标准长CoT数据训练的DLM相比,NAP在并行解码下表现更优,且并行度越高,增益越大。结果表明,重新设计数据与监督机制是推动真实非自回归生成的可行方向。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are often advertised as enabling parallel token generation, yet practical fast DLMs frequently converge to left-to-right, autoregressive (AR)-like decoding dynamics. In contrast, genuinely non-AR generation is promising because it removes AR's sequential bottleneck, better exploiting parallel hardware to reduce synchronization/communication overhead and improve latency scaling with output length. We argue that a primary driver of AR-like decoding is a mismatch between DLM objectives and the highly sequential structure of widely used training data, including standard pretraining corpora and long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose NAP (Non-Autoregressive Parallel DLMs), a proof-of-concept, data-centric approach that better aligns supervision with non-AR parallel decoding. NAP curates examples as multiple independent reasoning trajectories and couples them with a parallel-forced decoding strategy that encourages multi-token parallel updates. Across math reasoning benchmarks, NAP yields stronger performance under parallel decoding than DLMs trained on standard long CoT data, with gains growing as parallelism increases. Our results suggest that revisiting data and supervision is a principled direction for mitigating AR-like behavior and moving toward genuinely non-autoregressive parallel generation in DLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/NAP.
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