Language & LLMs Aug 2025 · #25 most cited · 163 citations

Seed Diffusion: A Large-Scale Diffusion Language Model with High-Speed Inference

Yuxuan Song et al.

arXiv:2508.02193

In short

Seed Diffusion is a code model that generates text by discrete diffusion, refining many tokens in parallel instead of one at a time. It reaches about 2,100 tokens per second while staying competitive on code benchmarks.

Why it matters

It is evidence that diffusion language models can be dramatically faster without giving up quality.

Read first

The 4 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 22 ideas · basics first
  1. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  2. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  3. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  4. Language Modeling · read first ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  5. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  6. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  7. Diffusion Model · read first ✓ understood

    A generative model that learns to denoise data, achieving state-of-the-art image generation (Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2).

  8. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  9. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  10. Inference ✓ understood

    Running a trained model on new inputs to get predictions, with its weights frozen: the stage of a model's life that users actually interact with.

  11. Inference Latency · read first ✓ understood

    The time delay between submitting input and receiving output from a deployed model, critical for real-time applications.

  12. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  13. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  14. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  15. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  16. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  17. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  18. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  19. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  20. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  21. Large Language Model ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  22. Code Generation · read first ✓ understood

    AI systems that write code from natural language descriptions, powered by models like Codex, GitHub Copilot, or Claude Code.

In the frontier

Rank
#25 of 100
Citations
163
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Aug 2025

Topics: Diffusion LMs and decoding , Efficiency and serving , Coding agents

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

Nearby papers

Summary in our own words; read the paper for the details. ← All papers