While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images, prior work
reports a significant performance gap between diffusion and autoregressive (AR)
methods in language modeling. In this work, we show that simple masked discrete
diffusion is more performant than previously thought. We apply an effective
training recipe that improves the performance of masked diffusion models and
derive a simplified, Rao-Blackwellized objective that results in additional
improvements. Our objective has a simple form -- it is a mixture of classical
masked language modeling losses -- and can be used to train encoder-only
language models that admit efficient samplers, including ones that can generate
arbitrary lengths of text semi-autoregressively like a traditional language
model. On language modeling benchmarks, a range of masked diffusion models
trained with modern engineering practices achieves a new state-of-the-art among
diffusion models, and approaches AR perplexity. We release our code at:
this https URL

简化的掩码离散扩散模型在语言建模方面的性能优于以往认为的水平，可以用于训练只有编码器的高效采样语言模型，并在语言建模基准测试中取得了最新的最佳结果。