Paper Detail

AURORA-LM: Autoencoding Unified Representation for Continuous-Latent Diffusion Language Modeling

Jiajun Liang, Yucheng Liao, Yukang Cao, Jiazhe Wei, Ken Li, Wende Tan, Jiankun Zhang, ZY Cui, Jingkang Yang, Liucheng Guo, Shiqi Yang, B. Yang, Caifeng Shan, Ziwei Liu, Chenyang Si

arxiv Score 6.8

Published 2026-08-03 · First seen 2026-08-04

General AI

Abstract

Language remains an outlier in generative modeling: while images, video, and audio are increasingly modeled in continuous latent spaces, text generation still relies predominantly on discrete tokens. Existing continuous language models either inherit embedding spaces not designed for joint generation and decoding, or compress autoencoded latents to ease diffusion, sacrificing token-level fidelity. Instead of simplifying the representation to suit the generative model, we preserve a high-capacity, decodable text latent and design the diffusion model to learn its distribution directly. We introduce AURORA-LM, a continuous-latent diffusion language model that separates the construction of a decodable text representation from the modeling of its distribution. A Query-based Encoder-Decoder organizes text into a high-capacity, prefix-aligned latent sequence, and a Block-causal Diffusion Transformer learns its distribution through flow matching, generating blocks left to right while denoising positions within each block in parallel. Because such a latent is harder for diffusion to model, AURORA-LM restricts only the noisy-input pathway while retaining the full clean-latent prediction target, accommodating full-width latents without reducing decoder-facing capacity. We further calibrate the noise-level distribution to the latent width, and introduce self-trajectory consistency to bridge independently sampled training noise and iterative denoising at inference. AURORA-LM achieves the strongest performance among evaluated continuous and diffusion-based language models on OpenWebText free generation and XSum summarization. Scaling to 1B parameters with about 1500 EFLOPs of total compute yields further gains, surpassing a larger publicly released latent-diffusion language model under a matched evaluation protocol. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPUs.

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BibTeX

@article{liang2026aurora,
  title = {AURORA-LM: Autoencoding Unified Representation for Continuous-Latent Diffusion Language Modeling},
  author = {Jiajun Liang and Yucheng Liao and Yukang Cao and Jiazhe Wei and Ken Li and Wende Tan and Jiankun Zhang and ZY Cui and Jingkang Yang and Liucheng Guo and Shiqi Yang and B. Yang and Caifeng Shan and Ziwei Liu and Chenyang Si},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Language remains an outlier in generative modeling: while images, video, and audio are increasingly modeled in continuous latent spaces, text generation still relies predominantly on discrete tokens. Existing continuous language models either inherit embedding spaces not designed for joint generation and decoding, or compress autoencoded latents to ease diffusion, sacrificing token-level fidelity. Instead of simplifying the representation to suit the generative model, we preserve a high-capacity},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02602},
  keywords = {cs.CL, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2608.02602},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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