Efficient Parallel Samplers for Recurrent-Depth Models and Their
  Connection to Diffusion Language Models
Authors: name: Jonas Geiping; name: Xinyu Yang; name: Guinan Su
Published: 2025-10-16 17:59:07

Abstract: Language models with recurrent depth, also referred to as universal or looped
when considering transformers, are defined by the capacity to increase their
computation through the repetition of layers. Recent efforts in pretraining
have demonstrated that these architectures can scale to modern language
modeling tasks while exhibiting advantages in reasoning tasks. In this work, we
examine the relationship between recurrent-depth models and diffusion language
models. Building on their similarities, we develop a new diffusion forcing
sampler for these models to accelerate generation. The sampler advances by
decoding new tokens at every forward pass of the model, while the latent states
of these tokens can be further refined in parallel through recurrence.
Theoretically, generation with our sampler is strictly more expressive than the
baseline autoregressive generation using the same time budget on modern
hardware. Moreover, this sampler, based on principles from diffusion
literature, can be directly applied to existing 3.5B recurrent-depth
transformers without any tuning, leading to up to a 5x speedup. Consequently,
our findings not only provide an efficient mechanism for parallelizing the
extra computation in recurrent-depth models at inference, but also suggest that
such models can be naturally viewed as strong continuous, though causal,
diffusion language models.