CDLM: CONSISTENCY DIFFUSION LANGUAGE MODELS FOR FASTER SAMPLING

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising parallel generation paradigm but suffer from slow inference due to numerous refinement steps and an inability to use standard KV caching. We introduce CDLM (Consistency Diffusion Language Models), a training-based acceleration method that simultaneously tackles both bottlenecks. CDLM integrates consistency modeling to drastically reduce the number of required sampling steps by enabling multi-token finalization. Furthermore, we enforce a block-wise causal attention mask during fine-tuning, making the model fully compatible with KV caching. Experiments show CDLM achieves 3.6×-12.8× lower latency while maintaining competitive accuracy on math and coding tasks. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ConsistencyDLManonymous-3E88/.