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DiffusionGemma Technical Report

arxiv.org

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Re: DiffusionGemma Technical Report

#2
I'm very interested in Diffusion text models. The concept of taking noise and adding words starting randomly all over the response, and filling in the noise from there on breaks my brain.

I'm sure I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, though.

Re: DiffusionGemma Technical Report

#3
Just wanted to share this, I found it was a really nice resource to understand how diffusion Gemma worked: https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...

The really interesting thing to me was that they didn’t need to train this model from scratch they just used their existing MOE checkpoint:

“To convert a decoder-only model (Gemma 4 26B A4B) into a denoiser, we can make use of something it is not directly using when generating tokens, namely the logits of all tokens!”

What makes me hopeful about this release is that possibly this same conversion can be applied to other open models and we might see a bunch of diffusion versions of existing local models. It’s exciting stuff!

Re: DiffusionGemma Technical Report

#5

I'm very interested in Diffusion text models. The concept of taking noise and adding words starting randomly all over the response, and filling in the noise from there on breaks my brain. I'm sure I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, though.

DiffusionGemma goes one step further even, and does this denoising over multiple "canvases" which lets it do reasoning and separate out a "final reply" canvas, looks something like this: https://gist.github.com/embedding-shapes/f4cb46bad704b6d0168...

Diffusion text models for me is the more interesting type of LLMs for local usage, as it really makes good use of single GPUs for single responses, rather than auto-regressive ones, and is a lot faster! Probably the fastest model I've been able to run so far, ending up doing ~670 tok/s (depending on the type of text) on a Pro 6000

Re: DiffusionGemma Technical Report

#8

I'm very interested in Diffusion text models. The concept of taking noise and adding words starting randomly all over the response, and filling in the noise from there on breaks my brain. I'm sure I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, though.

How does that break your brain? It's how basically every human writes and iterates on text..?

Re: DiffusionGemma Technical Report

#9

I'm very interested in Diffusion text models. The concept of taking noise and adding words starting randomly all over the response, and filling in the noise from there on breaks my brain. I'm sure I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, though.

How does that break your brain? It's how basically every human writes and iterates on text..?

Because my brain thinks through text in a forward motion. Pausing at the end of each word and searching for the next.

My entire brain runs on sentences and words since I have no inner eye or whatever. So my thinking and writing both work kind of forward only.

I wouldn’t have thought that was too unique. But maybe it is?

Re: DiffusionGemma Technical Report

#10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that break your brain? It's how basically every human writes and iterates on text..?

Because my brain thinks through text in a forward motion. Pausing at the end of each word and searching for the next. My entire brain runs on sentences and words since I have no inner eye or whatever. So my thinking and writing both work kind of forward only. I wouldn’t have thought that was too unique. But maybe it is?

Normally people have feelings about things before they are able to put them into words, I would imagine if you were asked a question like "what city would you most like to visit" then unless you've already thought about it a lot, then you would have to do substantial non-verbal thinking before you can come up with an answer, and once you have the answer you may respond "my favorite city is X" and you decided what X would be before you started the sentence.
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