LAD: LoRA-Adapted Diffusion

Abstract

Autoregressive models dominate text generation but suffer from left-to-right decoding constraints that limit efficiency and bidirectional reasoning. Diffusion-based models offer a flexible alternative but face challenges in adapting to discrete text efficiently. We propose LAD (LoRA-Adapted Diffusion), a framework for non-autoregressive generation that adapts LLaMA models for iterative, bidirectional sequence refinement using LoRA adapters. LAD employs a structural denoising objective combining masking with text perturbations (swaps, duplications and span shifts), enabling full sequence editing during generation. We aim to demonstrate that LAD could be a viable and efficient alternative to training diffusion models from scratch, by providing both validation results as well as two interactive demos directly available online: https://ruurdkuiper.github.io/tini-lad/https://huggingface.co/spaces/Ruurd/tini-lad Inference and training code: https://github.com/RuurdKuiper/lad-code.