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Masked diffusion is a discrete analog of continuous diffusion. Continuous diffusion gradually adds Gaussian noise, then learns to reverse that process to recover data. Masked diffusion instead progressively replaces tokens with a mask token, then learns to fill them back in.

Alec Helbling

11,723 subscribers

24,757 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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5 Comments

aidan ewart2 months ago

why is noising by replacing with [MASK] better than noising by replacing with a randomly sampled token (which seems more analogous to the noising done in normal diffusions)?

Alec Helbling2 months ago

Link to code for visualizations.

Sohir Maskey2 months ago

Actually uniform diffusion is the discrete analog to continuous diffusion with Gaussian prior see eg

dennis2 months ago

I wonder how efficient mixing/ diverse discrete would be compared to continuous?

andy2 months ago

I never thought words could be corrected by images in this way!

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