# One Latent, Many Tokens: Jointly Learning Compressed Embeddings for Efficient Language Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33698 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33698/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Discrete and text diffusion, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 46 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)
- [Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07524/) (2024)
- [Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16834/) (2023)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [Simplified and Generalized Masked Diffusion for Discrete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04329/) (2024)
- [Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15487/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Fast-dLLM: Training-free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM by Enabling KV Cache and Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22618/) (2025)
- [Analog Bits: Generating Discrete Data using Diffusion Models with Self-Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04202/) (2022)
- [One Billion Word Benchmark for Measuring Progress in Statistical Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.3005/) (2013)
- [LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08544/) (2025)
- [SSD-LM: Semi-autoregressive Simplex-based Diffusion Language Model for Text Generation and Modular Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17432/) (2022)
- [One Transformer Fits All Distributions in Multi-Modal Diffusion at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06555/) (2023)
- [Likelihood-Based Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18619/) (2023)
- [The Diffusion Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10892/) (2025)
- [Latent Diffusion for Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09462/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most continuous diffusion language models process one latent position per token at each sampling step, making generation expensive. Two-stage methods lower the cost by reducing the latent length, but they fix the compressed embedding space before training the diffusion model. Embeddings from the fixed space can be difficult to model with diffusion and decode reliably into tokens, which limits generation quality after compression. To address this problem, we introduce JPEG-DLM (Joint-embedding Prediction for Efficient Generation with Diffusion Language Model), which jointly trains a compressor, a flow matching model and a decoding module. With joint-embedding prediction, JPEG-DLM learns compressed embeddings that are more structured, easier to model with diffusion and reliably decodable into tokens. JPEG-DLM achieves the lowest mean Gen-PPL and highest throughput among recent diffusion and flow models on LM1B and OWT. At a compression rate of 0.5 on OWT, it reaches a Gen-PPL of 34.52 and approximately 2.3 times ELF's throughput. These results suggest that jointly learning compressed embeddings offers a promising path toward efficient diffusion language modeling. Code will be released soon.