# Segment-Level Diffusion: A Framework for Controllable Long-Form Generation with Diffusion Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Discrete and text diffusion, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 33 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Discrete and text diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/discrete-and-text-diffusion/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16834/) (2023)
- [Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05931/) (2021)
- [SAMSum Corpus: A Human-annotated Dialogue Dataset for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12237/) (2019)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Training Methods for Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07725/) (2016)
- [DialogSum: A Real-Life Scenario Dialogue Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06762/) (2021)
- [Text Generation with Diffusion Language Models: A Pre-training Approach with Continuous Paragraph Denoise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11685/) (2022)
- [PLANNER: Generating Diversified Paragraph via Latent Language Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02531/) (2023)
- [Patched Denoising Diffusion Models For High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01316/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models for Non-autoregressive Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06574/) (2023)
- [SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13194/) (2023)
- [DiffuSeq-v2: Bridging Discrete and Continuous Text Spaces for Accelerated Seq2Seq Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05793/) (2023)
- [Exposure Bias versus Self-Recovery: Are Distortions Really Incremental for Autoregressive Text Generation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10617/) (2019)
- [DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05271/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-NAT: Self-Prompting Discrete Diffusion for Non-Autoregressive Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04044/) (2023)
- [Beyond Error Propagation in Neural Machine Translation: Characteristics of Language Also Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00120/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey on Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10875/) (2025)
- [Discrete Diffusion in Large Language and Multimodal Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13759/) (2025)
- [C3TG: Conflict-aware, Composite, and Collaborative Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09292/) (2025)
- [From Interface to Inference: Eliciting Any-Order Inference from Any-Order Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26504/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have shown promise in text generation, but often struggle with generating long, coherent, and contextually accurate text. Token-level diffusion doesn't model word-order dependencies explicitly and operates on short, fixed output windows, while passage-level diffusion struggles with learning robust representations for long-form text. To address these challenges, we propose Segment-Level Diffusion (SLD), a framework that enhances diffusion-based text generation through text segmentation, robust representation training with adversarial and contrastive learning, and improved latent-space guidance. By segmenting long-form outputs into multiple latent representations and decoding them with an autoregressive decoder, SLD simplifies diffusion predictions and improves scalability. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that, when compared to other diffusion and autoregressive baselines SLD achieves competitive or superior fluency, coherence, and contextual compatibility in automatic and human evaluations.