Zijin Feng

Author directory

2026

Although uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) represent a promising diffusion paradigm, scaling them remains challenging. We identify the core obstacle as an over-uniform training objective and condition-target confusion during sampling. To address these, we propose Less Uniform Diffusion (LUDI), a novel UDLM framework. Specifically, we (i) introduce a less uniform loss that directs each reverse transition toward the clean token, and (ii) equip the model with per-token time embeddings that supply token-level corruption hints, enabling confidence-based few-step sampling. Experiments across scales show that LUDI yields cleaner supervision and improves few-step generation. We further continue-train a 7B autoregressive model into LUDI-7B, resulting in a UDLM capable of complex reasoning. It achieves 3 token-per-step speedup over AR decoding and a competitive performance compared with masked diffusion baselines, revealing that the full potential of UDLMs for complex generation remains to be unlocked.

2024

Text clustering is a fundamental task in natural language processing with numerous applications. However, traditional clustering methods often struggle with domain-specific fine-tuning and the presence of outliers. To address these challenges, we introduce LLMEdgeRefine, an iterative clustering method enhanced by large language models (LLMs), focusing on edge points refinement. LLMEdgeRefine enhances current clustering methods by creating super-points to mitigate outliers and iteratively refining clusters using LLMs for improved semantic coherence. Our method demonstrates superior performance across multiple datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques, and offering robustness, adaptability, and cost-efficiency for diverse text clustering applications.