# DiffuGR: Generative Document Retrieval with Diffusion Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08150/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Discrete and text diffusion, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 38 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08877/) (2021)
- [A Continuous Time Framework for Discrete Denoising Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14987/) (2022)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09573/) (2025)
- [Your Absorbing Discrete Diffusion Secretly Models the Conditional Distributions of Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03736/) (2024)
- [Scaling Diffusion Language Models via Adaptation from Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17891/) (2024)
- [Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06991/) (2022)
- [Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17298/) (2025)
- [DiffusionBERT: Improving Generative Masked Language Models with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15029/) (2022)
- [Train for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Understanding Token Ordering in Masked Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06768/) (2025)
- [Beyond Autoregression: Discrete Diffusion for Complex Reasoning and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14157/) (2024)
- [GPL: Generative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07577/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Search Engines: Generating Substrings as Document Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10628/) (2022)
- [A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02743/) (2022)
- [Text Generation with Diffusion Language Models: A Pre-training Approach with Continuous Paragraph Denoise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11685/) (2022)
- [How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11841/) (2023)
- [RepBERT: Contextualized Text Embeddings for First-Stage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15498/) (2020)
- [Learning to Rank in Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15222/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Language Models Can Perform Many Tasks with Scaling and Instruction-Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12219/) (2023)
- [Scalable and Effective Generative Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09134/) (2023)
- [CorpusBrain: Pre-train a Generative Retrieval Model for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07652/) (2022)
- [DiffuSeq-v2: Bridging Discrete and Continuous Text Spaces for Accelerated Seq2Seq Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05793/) (2023)
- [DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09744/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DiffuRank: Effective Document Reranking with Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12528/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Generative Retrieval Model with Staged Pretraining for Food Delivery on Meituan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06654/) (2026)
- [Disentangling Paradigm, Identifier, and Decoding in Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08716/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative retrieval (GR) reframes document retrieval as an end-to-end task of generating sequential document identifiers (DocIDs). Existing GR methods predominantly rely on left-to-right auto-regressive decoding, which suffers from two fundamental limitations: (i) a mismatch between DocID generation and natural language generation, whereby an incorrect DocID token generated at an early step can lead to entirely erroneous retrieval; and (ii) an inability to dynamically balance the trade-off between retrieval efficiency and accuracy, which is crucial for practical applications. To tackle these challenges, we propose generative document retrieval with diffusion language models, termed DiffuGR. DiffuGR formulates DocID generation as a discrete diffusion process. During training, DocIDs are corrupted through a stochastic masking process, and a diffusion language model is trained to recover them under a retrieval-aware objective. For inference, DiffuGR generates DocID tokens in parallel and refines them through a controllable number of denoising steps. Unlike auto-regressive decoding, DiffuGR introduce a novel mechanism to first generate plenty of confident DocID tokens and then refine the generation through diffusion-based denoising. Moreover, DiffuGR also offers explicit runtime control over the quality-latency tradeoff. Extensive experiments on widely-applied retrieval benchmarks show that DiffuGR outperforms strong auto-regressive generative retrievers. Additionally, we verify that DiffuGR achieves flexible control over the quality-latency trade-off via variable denoising budgets.