Large Language Models to Diffusion Finetuning

Edoardo Cetin, Tianyu Zhao, Yujin Tang

Keywords: language models, large language models, diffusion, finetuning, test-time scaling

TL;DR: New finetuning method powering large language models with the ability to scale test-time compute and other key properties of the diffusion framework..

Abstract: We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve monotonically increasing accuracy, directly translating to improved performance across downstream tasks. Furthermore, our finetuned models can expertly answer questions on specific topics by integrating powerful guidance techniques, and autonomously determine the compute required for a given problem by leveraging adaptive ODE solvers. Our method is applicable to any foundation model pre-trained with cross-entropy and does not modify any of its original weights, fully preserving its strong single-step generation capabilities. We show our method can be more effective and is fully compatible with traditional finetuning and search approaches, introducing an orthogonal new direction to unify the strengths of the autoregressive and diffusion frameworks.

Submission Number: 43