Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for high-quality data generation, such as image generation. Despite its success in continuous spaces, discrete diffusion models, which apply to domains such as texts and natural languages, remain under-studied and often suffer from slow generation speed. In this paper, we propose a novel de-randomized diffusion process, which leads to an accelerated algorithm for discrete diffusion models. Our technique significantly reduces the number of function evaluations (i.e., calls to the neural network), making the sampling process much faster. Furthermore, we introduce a continuous-time (i.e., infinite-step) sampling algorithm that can provide even better sample qualities than its discrete-time (finite-step) counterpart. Extensive experiments on natural language generation and machine translation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our method in terms of both generation speed and sample quality over existing methods for discrete diffusion models.

通过提出一种新颖的去随机扩散过程，我们加速了离散扩散模型的算法；我们还引入了一种连续时间采样算法，能够比有限步长的离散时间采样算法提供更好的样本质量。大量实验表明，在自然语言生成和机器翻译任务中，我们的方法在离散扩散模型的生成速度和样本质量方面表现出优越性。

离散扩散模型的快速采样通过去随机化