BitLM: Unlocking Multi-Token Language Generation with Bitwise Continuous Diffusion

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11577v1
• Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 06:02:59 GMT
• Title: BitLM: Unlocking Multi-Token Language Generation with Bitwise Continuous Diffusion
• Abstract summary: BitLM is a language model that represents each token as a fixed-length binary code.<n>By replacing the large-vocabulary softmax with bitwise denoising, BitLM reframes token generation as iterative commitment in a compact binary space.
• Score: 47.110252169791075
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Autoregressive language models generate text one token at a time, yet natural language is inherently structured in multi-token units, including phrases, n-grams, and collocations that carry meaning jointly. This one-token bottleneck limits both the expressiveness of the model during pre-training and its throughput at inference time. Existing remedies such as speculative decoding or diffusion-based language models either leave the underlying bottleneck intact or sacrifice the causal structure essential to language modeling. We propose BitLM, a language model that represents each token as a fixed-length binary code and employs a lightweight diffusion head to denoise multiple tokens in parallel within each block. Crucially, BitLM preserves left-to-right causal attention across blocks while making joint lexical decisions within each block, combining the reliability of autoregressive modeling with the parallelism of iterative refinement. By replacing the large-vocabulary softmax with bitwise denoising, BitLM reframes token generation as iterative commitment in a compact binary space, enabling more efficient pre-training and substantially faster inference without altering the causal foundation that makes language models effective. Our results demonstrate that the one-token-at-a-time paradigm is not a fundamental requirement but an interface choice, and that changing it can yield a stronger and faster language model. We hope BitLM points toward a promising direction for next-generation language model architectures.

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