Data-Efficient Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Language Models via On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.06712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transformation of autoregressive models (ARLMs) into diffusion language models (DLMs). Rather than pretraining from scratch, prior work replaces the causal attention in ARLMs with bidirectional attention and then trains the resulting model using a DLM objective. However, these approaches incur two distribution shifts. First, transitioning from a next-token prediction objective to a DLM objective can discard knowledge acquired by the ARLM during training. Second, standard DLMs suffer from a train-inference mismatch, as the training

Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.

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