mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation

arXiv 2205.14217 ↗First posted 27 May 2022cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 1,006

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 681 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Controlling the behavior of language models (LMs) without re-training is a major open problem in natural language generation. While recent works have demonstrated successes on controlling simple sentence attributes (e.g., sentiment), there has been little progress on complex, fine-grained controls (e.g., syntactic structure). To address this challenge, we develop a new non-autoregressive language model based on continuous diffusions that we call Diffusion-LM. Building upon the recent successes of diffusion models in continuous domains, Diffusion-LM iteratively denoises a sequence of Gaussian vectors into word vectors, yielding a sequence of intermediate latent variables. The continuous, hierarchical nature of these intermediate variables enables a simple gradient-based algorithm to perform complex, controllable generation tasks. We demonstrate successful control of Diffusion-LM for six challenging fine-grained control tasks, significantly outperforming prior work.

Key facts. Cited by 1,006 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 43 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2022.

Builds on

43 of 59 references.

References · 43

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  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  3. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  4. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
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  7. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
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31 more
  1. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,736
  2. 2022OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Modelscited by 3,464
  3. 2019The Curious Case of Neural Text Degenerationcited by 2,881
  4. 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,903
  5. 2021Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spacescited by 1,665
  6. 2020DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesiscited by 1,339
  7. 2021Variational Diffusion Modelscited by 1,145
  8. 2019Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generationcited by 793
  9. 2019CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generationcited by 754
  10. 2020WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generationcited by 620
  11. 2017Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translationcited by 457
  12. 2021DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Expertscited by 434
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  14. 2020GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generationcited by 377
  15. 2021FUDGE: Controlled Text Generation With Future Discriminatorscited by 374
  16. 2019Abductive Commonsense Reasoningcited by 300
  17. 2017The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generationcited by 252
  18. 2021Autoregressive Diffusion Modelscited by 208
  19. 2018Constituency Parsing with a Self-Attentive Encodercited by 196
  20. 2018Deterministic Non-Autoregressive Neural Sequence Modeling by Iterative Refinementcited by 194
  21. 2021On Fast Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 170
  22. 2022COLD Decoding: Energy-based Constrained Text Generation with Langevin Dynamicscited by 159
  23. 2021Symbolic Music Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 152
  24. 2019Insertion Transformer: Flexible Sequence Generation via Insertion Operationscited by 123
  25. 2020Enabling Language Models to Fill in the Blankscited by 121
  26. 2018Fast Decoding in Sequence Models using Discrete Latent Variablescited by 103
  27. 2020Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation with Latent Alignmentscited by 96
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 47; 2023: 230; 2024: 205; 2025: 232; 2026: 292.

1,006 papers.

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  1. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,550
  2. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,591
  3. 2023Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Modelcited by 1,259
  4. 2022Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applicationscited by 1,107
  5. 2022eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoiserscited by 921
  6. 2025Large Language Diffusion Modelscited by 872
  7. 2024Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Modelscited by 800
  8. 2023Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distributioncited by 712
  9. 2024Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusioncited by 634
  10. 2024Simplified and Generalized Masked Diffusion for Discrete Datacited by 606
  11. 2022Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Spacecited by 567
  12. 2025Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Modelscited by 515
38 more
  1. 2022All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Modelscited by 498
  2. 2024Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Modelcited by 468
  3. 2022DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 439
  4. 2023Universal Guidance for Diffusion Modelscited by 426
  5. 2022Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Taskcited by 417
  6. 2023Augmented Language Models: a Surveycited by 398
  7. 2025Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Modelscited by 385
  8. 2022TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Modelscited by 373
  9. 2022Analog Bits: Generating Discrete Data using Diffusion Models with Self-Conditioningcited by 362
  10. 2022DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detectioncited by 354
  11. 2024Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Surveycited by 352
  12. 2023DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Freecited by 346
  13. 2022Rodin: A Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Digital Avatars Using Diffusioncited by 309
  14. 2024Discrete Flow Matchingcited by 301
  15. 2024Generative Flows on Discrete State-Spaces: Enabling Multimodal Flows with Applications to Protein Co-Designcited by 294
  16. 2022Generating Sequences by Learning to Self-Correctcited by 271
  17. 2022Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 269
  18. 2024Scaling Diffusion Language Models via Adaptation from Autoregressive Modelscited by 268
  19. 2023Efficient Diffusion Training via Min-SNR Weighting Strategycited by 242
  20. 2022A Survey on Generative Diffusion Modelcited by 238
  21. 2023Automatically Correcting Large Language Models: Surveying the landscape of diverse self-correction strategiescited by 236
  22. 2025Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusioncited by 225
  23. 2023DIFUSCO: Graph-based Diffusion Solvers for Combinatorial Optimizationcited by 216
  24. 2022DiffusionBERT: Improving Generative Masked Language Models with Diffusion Modelscited by 214
  25. 2022Continuous diffusion for categorical datacited by 202
  26. 2025A General Framework for Inference-time Scaling and Steering of Diffusion Modelscited by 201
  27. 2024Scaling up Masked Diffusion Models on Textcited by 195
  28. 2022SSD-LM: Semi-autoregressive Simplex-based Diffusion Language Model for Text Generation and Modular Controlcited by 191
  29. 2022Guided Conditional Diffusion for Controllable Traffic Simulationcited by 189
  30. 2023Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Textcited by 189
  31. 2023Automatically Auditing Large Language Models via Discrete Optimizationcited by 187
  32. 2023Geometric Latent Diffusion Models for 3D Molecule Generationcited by 185
  33. 2025DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generationcited by 184
  34. 2024COLD-Attack: Jailbreaking LLMs with Stealthiness and Controllabilitycited by 162
  35. 2023Flow Matching in Latent Spacecited by 155
  36. 2023Protein Design with Guided Discrete Diffusioncited by 154
  37. 2023A Reparameterized Discrete Diffusion Model for Text Generationcited by 152
  38. 2024Simple Guidance Mechanisms for Discrete Diffusion Modelscited by 148

50 most cited of 1,006 All 1,006 (JSON)

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  1. 2026Steering Without Breaking: Mechanistically Informed Interventions for Discrete Diffusion Language Models
  2. 2025State Fourier Diffusion Language Model (SFDLM): A Scalable, Novel Iterative Approach to Language Modeling
  3. 2024Energy-Based Diffusion Language Models for Text Generation
  4. 2025Discrete Diffusion Models for Language Generation
  5. 2024TEncDM: Understanding the Properties of the Diffusion Model in the Space of Language Model Encodings
  6. 2026CoDAR: Continuous Diffusion Language Models are More Powerful Than You Think
  7. 2025Understanding the Quality-Diversity Trade-off in Diffusion Language Models
  8. 2025Simple Denoising Diffusion Language Models