Think While You Generate: Discrete Diffusion with Planned Denoising
<|reference_start|>Think While You Generate: Discrete Diffusion with Planned Denoising: Discrete diffusion has achieved state-of-the-art performance, outperforming or approaching autoregressive models on standard benchmarks. In this work, we introduce Discrete Diffusion with Planned Denoising (DDPD), a novel framework that separates the generation process into two models: a planner and a denoiser. At inference time, the planner selects which positions to denoise next by identifying the most corrupted positions in need of denoising, including both initially corrupted and those requiring additional refinement. This plan-and-denoise approach enables more efficient reconstruction during generation by iteratively identifying and denoising corruptions in the optimal order. DDPD outperforms traditional denoiser-only mask diffusion methods, achieving superior results on language modeling benchmarks such as text8, OpenWebText, and token-based generation on ImageNet $256 \times 256$. Notably, in language modeling, DDPD significantly reduces the performance gap between diffusion-based and autoregressive methods in terms of generative perplexity. Code is available at https://github.com/liusulin/DDPD.<|reference_end|>
@article{liu2024think,
    title={Think While You Generate: Discrete Diffusion with Planned Denoising},
    author={Sulin Liu, Juno Nam, Andrew Campbell, Hannes St"ark, Yilun Xu, Tommi
  Jaakkola, Rafael G'omez-Bombarelli},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.06264},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2410.06264},
    primaryClass={cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL cs.CV stat.ML}
}