about
Next-Concept Modeling: Fast, Parallel Coarse-to-Fine Text Generation (arxiv.org)
66 points by theanonymousone 2 hours ago | hide | past | pdf | 7 comments on HN

In plain words: Text is squeezed into layers of codes from rough to fine, and a transformer writes each layer's codes at once instead of one word at a time. It beat the strongest diffusion text model while running 21 times faster on a large language dataset.

Abstract

Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer parallel sampling for faster generation than autoregressive models, an increasingly important advantage as inference becomes a dominant computational workload. However, DLMs degrade quickly with fewer sampling steps, process the full sequence at every step, and require many passes over the dataset to reach good quality. We introduce Next-Concept Modeling (NCM), a two-stage, coarse-to-fine framework: a multiscale residual VQ-VAE encodes text into a hierarchy of discrete codes, and a transformer generates one level at a time, predicting all codes within a level in parallel. At matched parameter scales, NCM achieves better generative perplexity than the strongest DLM baseline on LM1B while running $21\times$ faster. On OpenWebText, NCM is competitive with the strongest DLM while running $10\times$ faster; on XSum, it matches the strongest DLM's ROUGE-L while being $31\times$ faster. On the reasoning task of Sudoku, NCM outperforms autoregressive and diffusion baselines across all difficulty levels, using fewer function evaluations. On the reasoning task of Sudoku, NCM outperforms autoregressive and diffusion baselines across all difficulty levels, using fewer function evaluations.

Hermann Kumbong, Ishan S. Khare, Iddah Mlauzi, Andrew Woen, Charles Ding, E. Kelly Buchanan, Simran Arora, Azalia Mirhoseini, Christopher Ré
arXiv:2610.14162 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Oct 9, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN
Also discussed: Nov 2026 (4 points, 2 comments) · Oct 2026 (2 points, 0 comments) · Oct 2026 (4 points, 0 comments)

Can we apply any insights from image and video compression and partitioning to this kind of dimensional masking ?
Who's going to train a nice big coding model based on this? I don't have the GPUs to do it...
I'm trying to run it, so far no luck
I keep getting clickbait youtube videos about how "NCM" obsoletes "LLMs" and "Nvidia memory chips" (yes, it's that bad).

This makes me wonder what these people think an "LLM" even is. The name itself implies that it is large and about language. It does not imply that an "LLM" is inherently autoregressive or that it has any particular architecture even though most LLMs are transformers. Anything can be a large language model as long as it is large and models language.

NCM is basically a hierarchical diffusion transformer where the further layers take one big token and then generate two smaller tokens. So it is more like an evaluation strategy. You could apply this to any model architecture.

I personally think the name NCM itself is terrible because it contains the word "next" which inherently implies an ordering and somehow we are supposed to think that "LLM" which contains no mention of ordering, is constrained to ordered token production.