# DiffuSent: Towards a Unified Diffusion Framework for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01323 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01323/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05379/) (2021)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01616/) (2019)
- [Position-Aware Tagging for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02609/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Non-Autoregressive Generation for Neural Machine Translation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09269/) (2022)
- [A Joint Training Dual-MRC Framework for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00816/) (2021)
- [Learning Span-Level Interactions for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12214/) (2021)
- [Open-Domain Targeted Sentiment Analysis via Span-Based Extraction and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03820/) (2019)
- [MvP: Multi-view Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12627/) (2023)
- [PASTE: A Tagging-Free Decoding Framework Using Pointer Networks for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04794/) (2021)
- [The Image Local Autoregressive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02514/) (2021)
- [Seeking Common but Distinguishing Difference, A Joint Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09634/) (2021)
- [A Span-level Bidirectional Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12674/) (2022)
- [STAGE: Span Tagging and Greedy Inference Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15003/) (2022)
- [Prompt Based Tri-Channel Graph Convolution Neural Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11152/) (2023)
- [Aspect-oriented Opinion Alignment Network for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11447/) (2023)
- [Negative-Aware Diffusion Process for Temporal Knowledge Graph Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08815/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) encompasses seven distinct subtasks, each focusing on different extracted elements. Despite the proven success of generative models in unified aspect sentiment analysis, existing approaches often rely on auto-regressive token-by-token generation without grasping the whole information of the aspect and opinion terms, resulting in boundary insensitivity, particularly in context of multi-word aspect and opinion terms. To address these issues, we present DiffuSent, a non-auto-regressive diffusion framework that systematically formulates all ABSA subtasks as boundary denoising diffusion processes, progressively refining boundaries over noisy states. Furthermore, we introduce a contrastive denoising training strategy which effectively address duplicate predictions with subtle variations introduced by diffusion process. Extensive experiments across 28 settings (7 subtasks x 4 datasets) demonstrate that DiffuSent achieves delivers consistent improvements over the strongest generative and span-based systems. DiffuSent exhibits notable gains on multi-word triplets, achieving an average improvement of +2.48 F1, and maintains robust extraction accuracy in sentences containing multiple sentiment triplets. Moreover, the non-auto-regressive decoding enables substantial efficiency benefits, reaching up to 181 times faster inference than auto-regressive generative baselines