Paper Detail

Token Time Continuous Diffusion for Language Modeling

Parikshit Bansal, Sujay Sanghavi

huggingface Score 5.0

Published 2026-05-07 · First seen 2026-07-18

General AI

Abstract

In this paper we introduce token time continuous diffusion (TTCD), a new diffusion language model which (a) operates in continuous space, deterministically mapping Gaussian noise to a final token canvas with no further sampling, and crucially (b) incorporates a new notion of per-token times, with some tokens proceeding from noise to token at a faster rate than others. Continuous space modeling helps TTCD avoid the parallel sampling of multiple tokens, which is a key source of inaccuracy at high speedups for models that iterate purely in discrete space. The notion of per-token times helps TTCD to better model conditional generation, allows for more sure tokens to proceed at a faster rate, and allows for differentiated inter-token influences during refinement. TTCD outperforms discrete models at high speedups. We train a 160M parameter TTCD model on OpenWebText, and then self-distill it; we find that at high speedups we are comparable in unconditional generation quality, and outperform in conditional generation, several existing models of similar size trained, on the same data, and self-distilled. We achieve similar gains in Sudoku solving as well.

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BibTeX

@misc{bansal2026token,
  title = {Token Time Continuous Diffusion for Language Modeling},
  author = {Parikshit Bansal and Sujay Sanghavi},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {In this paper we introduce token time continuous diffusion (TTCD), a new diffusion language model which (a) operates in continuous space, deterministically mapping Gaussian noise to a final token canvas with no further sampling, and crucially (b) incorporates a new notion of per-token times, with some tokens proceeding from noise to token at a faster rate than others. Continuous space modeling helps TTCD avoid the parallel sampling of multiple tokens, which is a key source of inaccuracy at high },
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.14106},
  keywords = {huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2607.14106},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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