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ELF Introduces Continuous Diffusion Models For Language Generation

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📢 June 1 (Mon): ELF: Embedded Language Flows 🤔Unlike their image-domain counterparts, today’s leading diffusion language models (DLMs) primarily operate over discrete tokens. 💡The authors show that continuous DLMs can be made effective with minimal adaptation to the discrete domain. They propose Embedded Language Flows (ELF), a class of diffusion models in continuous embedding space based on continuous-time Flow Matching. Unlike existing DLMs, ELF predominantly stays within the continuous embedding space until the final time step, where it maps to discrete tokens using a shared-weight network. 🔧This formulation makes it straightforward to adapt established techniques from image-domain diffusion models, e.g., classifier-free guidance (CFG). 📈Experiments show that ELF substantially outperforms leading discrete and continuous DLMs, achieving better generation quality with fewer sampling steps. These results suggest that ELF offers a promising path toward effective continuous DLMs. This Monday, Keya Hu (@HuLillian39250) and Linlu Qiu (@linluqiu) will present their jointly led paper ELF.

9:30 AM · May 30, 2026 View on X