mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models for One-Step Language Modeling and Reasoning

arXiv 2609.15903 ↗First posted 14 Sep 2026cs.LGcited by 3

On the map: LLM reasoning → Diffusion reasoning and test-time scaling

also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Discrete diffusion and flow models are a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, but compressing many-step sampling into fewer steps typically requires distilling a pretrained teacher model. This caps the student at the teacher's quality and requires a costly two-stage training pipeline. We introduce Discrete Beckmann Transport Models (DBTM), built on a time-independent flow whose autonomous transport map provably carries any point in the ambient space to a fixed point on the vertices of the simplex in a single step. We show that this fixed-point property is characterized by a conservation equation whose residual can be minimized directly from data, removing the requirement for a teacher flow and time conditioning. Under this construction, a partially trained map corresponds to the flow truncated at finite time, so generation reduces to iterating one map until it reaches a fixed point. We further extend the map to a partial-context interpolant where additional function evaluations act as refinement steps rather than ODE integration steps. On language modeling and reasoning tasks, DBTM enables one- and few-step generation that improves quality and accuracy over discrete diffusion and continuous flow baselines.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion reasoning and test-time scaling, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 18 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2026.

Builds on

18 of 58 references.

References · 18

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,916
  2. 2019CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generationcited by 757
  3. 2013One Billion Word Benchmark for Measuring Progress in Statistical Language Modelingcited by 306
  4. 2022Continuous diffusion for categorical datacited by 207
  5. 2023TinyGSM: achieving >80% on GSM8k with small language modelscited by 69
  6. 2026Flow Map Language Models: One-step Language Modeling via Continuous Denoisingcited by 60
  7. 2026ELF: Embedded Language Flowscited by 38
  8. 2026LangFlow: Continuous Diffusion Rivals Discrete in Language Modelingcited by 33
  9. 2026Discrete Flow Mapscited by 28
  10. 2025SplitMeanFlow: Interval Splitting Consistency in Few-Step Generative Modelingcited by 26
  11. 2026Language Modeling with Hyperspherical Flowscited by 20
  12. 2025α-Flow: A Unified Framework for Continuous-State Discrete Flow Matching Modelscited by 18
6 more
  1. 2026Continuous Diffusion Scales Competitively with Discrete Diffusion for Languagecited by 16
  2. 2025Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching with Straight-Through Guidance for Controllable Biological Sequence Generationcited by 11
  3. 2026Posterior Refinement: Fast Language Generation via Any-Order Flow Mapscited by 9
  4. 2026DeltaFlow: Noise-Adaptive Bidirectional Gated Delta Networks for Embedded Language Flowscited by 2
  5. 2026Beckmann Transport Models: From Autonomous Flows to One-Step Mapscited by 2
  6. 2026Expanding Flow Mapscited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Temporal Self-Distillation: Faster Inference in Discrete Diffusion Language Models
  2. 2025FS-DFM: Fast and Accurate Long Text Generation with Few-Step Diffusion Language Models
  3. 2026Prism: Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification for Discrete Diffusion Language Models
  4. 2026Hierarchical Continuous Diffusion Language Models
  5. 2025d2: Improving Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Likelihood Estimation
  6. 2026Diffusion Language Models: An Experimental Analysis
  7. 2025Latent-Augmented Discrete Diffusion Models
  8. 2025A Survey on Diffusion Language Models