RePlaid

RePlaid: Continuous Diffusion Language Models Scale Competitively with Discrete Diffusion

This paper revisits continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) by introducing RePlaid, an updated version of Plaid that aligns its architecture with modern discrete DLMs. RePlaid establishes the first scaling law for continuous DLMs competitive with discrete approaches, achieving a compute gap of only 20× versus autoregressive models and a state-of-the-art perplexity bound of 22.1 on OpenWebText among continuous DLMs. The authors provide theoretical analysis showing that likelihood-based training naturally yields linear cross-entropy over time and creates structured embedding geometries, explaining the performance gains.