用二进制扩散并行生成多词,提速不丢因果性。
BitLM: Unlocking Multi-Token Language Generation with Bitwise Continuous Diffusion

- 将每个词转为固定长度二进制码,用轻量扩散头并行去噪多个词
- 推理速度提升显著,预训练效率更高,且保持自回归因果结构
- 适合追求高效推理的部署场景,或探索新型语言模型架构的研究者
自回归语言模型一次生成一个词,但自然语言的本质是多词单元(如短语、n-gram)共同承载意义。这一单词瓶颈限制了预训练表达力和推理吞吐量。现有方案如推测解码或扩散语言模型,要么未解决根本瓶颈,要么牺牲语言建模必需的因果结构。我们提出 BitLM,将每个词表示为固定长度的二进制码,并使用轻量扩散头在每块内并行去噪多个词。关键在于,BitLM 在块间保持从左到右的因果注意力,同时在块内进行联合词汇决策,结合了自回归模型的可靠性与迭代优化的并行性。通过用位级去噪替代大词汇量Softmax,BitLM 将词生成重构为紧凑二进制空间中的迭代确定过程,实现更高效的预训练和显著更快的推理,同时不改变使语言模型有效的因果基础。实验表明,单词生成并非本质要求,而是接口选择;改变它可构建更强更快的语言模型。我们希望 BitLM 指向下一代语言模型架构的可行方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autoregressive language models generate text one token at a time, yet natural language is inherently structured in multi-token units, including phrases, n-grams, and collocations that carry meaning jointly. This one-token bottleneck limits both the expressiveness of the model during pre-training and its throughput at inference time. Existing remedies such as speculative decoding or diffusion-based language models either leave the underlying bottleneck intact or sacrifice the causal structure essential to language modeling. We propose BitLM, a language model that represents each token as a fixed-length binary code and employs a lightweight diffusion head to denoise multiple tokens in parallel within each block. Crucially, BitLM preserves left-to-right causal attention across blocks while making joint lexical decisions within each block, combining the reliability of autoregressive modeling with the parallelism of iterative refinement. By replacing the large-vocabulary softmax with bitwise denoising, BitLM reframes token generation as iterative commitment in a compact binary space, enabling more efficient pre-training and substantially faster inference without altering the causal foundation that makes language models effective. Our results demonstrate that the one-token-at-a-time paradigm is not a fundamental requirement but an interface choice, and that changing it can yield a stronger and faster language model. We hope BitLM points toward a promising direction for next-generation language model architectures.
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