I tried to love mc, but its ergonomics felt slightly off. Maybe it's just hard to rewire my Norton / Volkov Commander / FAR Manager muscle memory, I don't know
Correct, diffusion LMs can edit their intermediate predictions, so "final" tokens aren't necessarily final. This is an exciting property because it allows models to correct errors in what's generated so far -- something that GPT-like models can't.
This editing is based on the Transformer's encoder property to predict token probabilities for __every__ token in a sequence, not just for [MASK]s. So when you input a sentence of three tokens `[MASK] cat barks`, Transformer will generate a probability distribution over the vocabulary for each of the three tokens, for free.
Now you can come up with many ways of how to decide whether you want to edit token or keep it as is. In the simplest case, take a new token if its probability higher than the original by some margin. In our example, say model returns the probability of the token "cat" on the second position as p_2("cat") = 0.3, while p_2("dog") = 0.6. We may want to replace "cat" with dog, and use it in the subsequent iterations.
Actual heuristics are slightly more complicated, but the base idea is this.
P.S. In order to teach LM not to just copy input unmasked tokens but to try to find a better replacement, your training objective should include replacing some % of input tokens with some other random token. Now you have part of the input masked, and part of the input corrupted, so the model can't blindly assume that all input tokens are here to stay.
Despite the name, diffusion LMs have little to do with image diffusion and are much closer to BERT and old good masked language modeling. Recall how BERT is trained:
1. Take a full sentence ("the cat sat on the mat")
2. Replace 15% of tokens with a [MASK] token ("the cat [MASK] on [MASK] mat")
3. Make the Transformer predict tokens at masked positions. It does it in parallel, via a single inference step.
Now, diffusion LMs take this idea further. BERT can recover 15% of masked tokens ("noise"), but why stop here. Let's train a model to recover texts with 30%, 50%, 90%, 100% of masked tokens.
Once you've trained that, in order to generate something from scratch, you start by feeding the model all [MASK]s. It will generate you mostly gibberish, but you can take some tokens (let's say, 10%) at random positions and assume that these tokens are generated ("final"). Next, you run another iteration of inference, this time input having 90% of masks and 10% of "final" tokens. Again, you mark 10% of new tokens as final. Continue, and in 10 steps you'll have generated a whole sequence. This is a core idea behind diffusion language models.
Of course, there are some optimizations in the real world. If you need to generate a really long text (over 200 tokens), you'd better split it in chunks and fully generate the first chunk in parallel before moving to the next one. This semi-autoregressive generation is what Block Diffusion does.
You can be smart about how exactly you pick tokens you consider generated and what % exactly. At earlier stages, when it's mostly noise, you can take more, and on final stages you can do more iterations and take fewer tokens.
All in all, diffusion LMs are still iterative, but the number of steps is much lower than in autoregressive models. A nice thing is that you can choose how many steps are you going to make, trading quality for speed.
In the extreme, you can even generate just one leftmost masked token with a diffusion LM, effectively turning it into a traditional causal language model.
I'm also very skeptical of the significance of this "aha moment". Even if they didn't include chain-of-thoughts to the base model's training data (unlikely), there are still plenty of it on the modern Internet. OpenAI released 800k of reasoning steps which are publicly available, github repositories, examples in CoT papers... It's definitely not a novel concept for a model, that it somehow discovered by its own.
I ended up being on a Linux fork of Far Manager, which works beautifully: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l