One-step Language Modeling via Continuous Denoising

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16813v1
• Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:23:07 GMT
• Title: One-step Language Modeling via Continuous Denoising
• Authors: Chanhyuk Lee, Jaehoon Yoo, Manan Agarwal, Sheel Shah, Jerry Huang, Aditi Raghunathan, Seunghoon Hong, Nicholas M. Boffi, Jinwoo Kim,
• Abstract summary: We show that language models leveraging flow-based continuous denoising can outperform discrete diffusion in both quality and speed.<n>Our work calls into question the widely held hypothesis that discrete diffusion processes are necessary for generative modeling over discrete modalities.
• Score: 36.18484491074519
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Language models based on discrete diffusion have attracted widespread interest for their potential to provide faster generation than autoregressive models. In practice, however, they exhibit a sharp degradation of sample quality in the few-step regime, failing to realize this promise. Here we show that language models leveraging flow-based continuous denoising can outperform discrete diffusion in both quality and speed. By revisiting the fundamentals of flows over discrete modalities, we build a flow-based language model (FLM) that performs Euclidean denoising over one-hot token encodings. We show that the model can be trained by predicting the clean data via a cross entropy objective, where we introduce a simple time reparameterization that greatly improves training stability and generation quality. By distilling FLM into its associated flow map, we obtain a distilled flow map language model (FMLM) capable of few-step generation. On the LM1B and OWT language datasets, FLM attains generation quality matching state-of-the-art discrete diffusion models. With FMLM, our approach outperforms recent few-step language models across the board, with one-step generation exceeding their 8-step quality. Our work calls into question the widely held hypothesis that discrete diffusion processes are necessary for generative modeling over discrete modalities, and paves the way toward accelerated flow-based language modeling at scale. Code is available at https://github.com/david3684/flm.

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