Addressing the Training-Inference Discrepancy in Discrete Diffusion for Text Generation

Masaki Asada, Makoto Miwa

Abstract: This study addresses the discrepancy between training and inference in discrete diffusion models for text generation. We propose two novel strategies: (1) a training schema that considers two-step diffusion processes, allowing the model to use its own predicted output as input for subsequent steps during training and (2) a scheduling technique that gradually increases the probability of using self-generated text as training progresses. Experiments conducted on four widely used text generation benchmark datasets demonstrate that both proposed strategies improve the performance of discrete diffusion models in text generation.