Fast-dLLM v2: Efficient Block-Diffusion LLM
About
Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language tasks, yet their inherent sequential decoding limits inference efficiency. In this work, we propose Fast-dLLM v2, a carefully designed block diffusion language model (dLLM) that efficiently adapts pretrained AR models into dLLMs for parallel text generation, requiring only approximately 1B tokens of fine-tuning. This represents a 500x reduction in training data compared to full-attention diffusion LLMs such as Dream (580B tokens), while preserving the original model's performance. Our approach introduces a novel training recipe that combines a block diffusion mechanism with a complementary attention mask, enabling blockwise bidirectional context modeling without sacrificing AR training objectives. To further accelerate decoding, we design a hierarchical caching mechanism: a block-level cache that stores historical context representations across blocks, and a sub-block cache that enables efficient parallel generation within partially decoded blocks. Coupled with our parallel decoding pipeline, Fast-dLLM v2 achieves up to 2.5x speedup over standard AR decoding without compromising generation quality. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Fast-dLLM v2 matches or surpasses AR baselines in accuracy, while delivering state-of-the-art efficiency among dLLMs - marking a significant step toward the practical deployment of fast and accurate LLMs. Code and model will be publicly released.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code Generation | HumanEval (test) | Pass@182.3 | 444 | |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | Accuracy (0-100)62.8 | 292 | |
| Code Generation | MBPP (test) | -- | 276 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | GSM8K | Speed Up (x)3.1 | 177 | |
| Code Generation | MBPP | Pass@178.2 | 175 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | MATH500 | Accuracy (ACC)59.4 | 133 | |
| Code Reasoning | LiveCodeBench | Accuracy6.8 | 46 | |
| Function-level Code Generation | HumanEval+ augmented (test) | Pass@140.2 | 46 | |
| Function-level Code Generation | MBPP+ augmented (test) | Pass@141.3 | 45 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | AMC23 | AVG@825 | 25 |