# DDPT: Diffusion-Driven Prompt Tuning for Large Language Model Code Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04351 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04351/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Discrete and text diffusion, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 32 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Intrinsic Dimensionality Explains the Effectiveness of Language Model Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13255/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10297/) (2020)
- [RLPrompt: Optimizing Discrete Text Prompts with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12548/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13169/) (2022)
- [CodeT5+: Open Code Large Language Models for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07922/) (2023)
- [UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05131/) (2022)
- [SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00390/) (2021)
- [Black-Box Tuning for Language-Model-as-a-Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03514/) (2022)
- [AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15980/) (2020)
- [PPT: Pre-trained Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04332/) (2021)
- [Continuous diffusion for categorical data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15089/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-based Time Series Imputation and Forecasting with Structured State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09399/) (2022)
- [Learning to Mine Aligned Code and Natural Language Pairs from Stack Overflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08949/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LibRec: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented LLMs for Library Migration Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09791/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Autoregressive Horizon: A Comprehensive Survey of Diffusion Models, World Modelling, and State Space Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23690/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, the quality of the generated code is heavily dependent on the structure and composition of the prompts used. Crafting high-quality prompts is a challenging task that requires significant knowledge and skills of prompt engineering. To advance the automation support for the prompt engineering for LLM-based code generation, we propose a novel solution Diffusion-Driven Prompt Tuning (DDPT) that learns how to generate optimal prompt embedding from Gaussian Noise to automate the prompt engineering for code generation. We evaluate the feasibility of diffusion-based optimization and abstract the optimal prompt embedding as a directional vector toward the optimal embedding. We use the code generation loss given by the LLMs to help the diffusion model capture the distribution of optimal prompt embedding during training. The trained diffusion model can build a path from the noise distribution to the optimal distribution at the sampling phrase, the evaluation result demonstrates that DDPT helps improve the prompt optimization for code generation.