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Fast-DLLM: Training-Free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM (arxiv.org)
70 points by nathan-barry 345 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 4 comments on HN

In plain words: Diffusion language models write many words at once but stay slow, recomputing everything and guessing uncertain words together. Reusing cached calculations and writing only confident words made them up to 27.6 times faster with little accuracy loss, matching the usual one-word-at-a-time models.

Abstract · Fast-dLLM: Training-free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM by Enabling KV Cache and Parallel Decoding

Diffusion-based large language models (Diffusion LLMs) have shown promise for non-autoregressive text generation with parallel decoding capabilities. However, the practical inference speed of open-sourced Diffusion LLMs often lags behind autoregressive models due to the lack of Key-Value (KV) Cache and quality degradation when decoding multiple tokens simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel block-wise approximate KV Cache mechanism tailored for bidirectional diffusion models, enabling cache reuse with negligible performance drop. Additionally, we identify the root cause of generation quality degradation in parallel decoding as the disruption of token dependencies under the conditional independence assumption. To address this, we propose a confidence-aware parallel decoding strategy that selectively decodes tokens exceeding a confidence threshold, mitigating dependency violations and maintaining generation quality. Experimental results on LLaDA and Dream models across multiple LLM benchmarks demonstrate up to \textbf{27.6$\times$ throughput} improvement with minimal accuracy loss, closing the performance gap with autoregressive models and paving the way for practical deployment of Diffusion LLMs.

Chengyue Wu, Hao Zhang, Shuchen Xue, Zhijian Liu, Shizhe Diao, Ligeng Zhu, Ping Luo, Song Han, Enze Xie
arXiv:2505.22618 · cs.CL · submitted May 28, 2025 · updated Jul 3, 2025
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Wait, under everything I’ve read about Diffusion Language Models and demos I’ve also seen and tried, inference is faster than traditional architectures. They state the opposite what gives?
Thats because those demos probably use parallel decoding. In principle, dLLM inference is slower since you have to do bidirectional generation over the whole generation window for each diffusion step. Example; you unmask one token in the 128 window for 128 diffusion steps to generate the full window.
In particular, part of the paper is about dynamically adjusting the number of tokens generated in parallel while maintaining roughly the same output quality as one-token-at-a-time decoding. The other part is about the KV caching strategy they use to speed up parallel decoding further.
What is parallel decoding?