r/deeplearning • u/TensorOfLeviChivita • 1h ago
Why are people so excited about diffusion LMs? What am I missing?
I understand the basic idea of generating text through iterative refinement instead of predicting every next token sequentially. It sounds interesting
But when it comes to reasoning. I am not fully convinced.
Autoregressive LLMs can already use chain of thought, RL, multiple sampling attempts and additional test-time compute to improve their answers. What does diffusion fundamentally give us that these models can not achieve?
Is the real advantage better reasoning through global refinement, faster inference, or something else entirely?
I can see the appeal for code, infilling, and structured generation, but I'm curious whether people expect diffusion LMs to beat autoregressive models at general reasoning, too.
Would love to hear arguments from both sides, especially from people who have actually experimented with these models.

