Diffusion LM compute gap falls from 17.8x to 3.0x, step by step

volokuleshov · x · 2026-10-16

Each change quantified: 17.8x → 12.8x (exact likelihood) → 9.6x → 7.8x, down to 3.0x at block size 4. The fits hold at a held-out budget 3x beyond the fitted range, and zero-shot accuracy tracks the likelihood ranking.

Related event: Cornell-Amazon Study Debunks the 16x Compute Gap Claim for Diffusion LMs(6 posts)→

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