arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Nemotron-TwoTower: Diffusion Language Modeling with Pretrained Autoregressive Context

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2606.26493 (cs)
[Submitted on 25 Jun 2026]

Title:Nemotron-TwoTower: Diffusion Language Modeling with Pretrained Autoregressive Context

View a PDF of the paper titled Nemotron-TwoTower: Diffusion Language Modeling with Pretrained Autoregressive Context, by Fitsum Reda and John Kamalu and Roger Waleffe and Mostofa Patwary and Mohammad Shoeybi and Bryan Catanzaro
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Abstract:Diffusion language models offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for parallel and iterative generation. However, existing approaches use a single network for both context representation and iterative denoising, forcing one model to serve both roles and limiting its capacity for either role. We propose TwoTower, a block-wise autoregressive diffusion model that decouples these roles into two towers: a frozen AR context tower that causally processes clean tokens, and a trainable diffusion denoiser tower with bidirectional block attention that refines noisy blocks via cross-attention to the context. Built on Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B, an open-weight 30B hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE model, and trained on approximately 2.1T tokens, Nemotron-TwoTower retains 98.7% of the autoregressive baseline's quality while offering 2.42X higher wall-clock generation throughput. We release the code and model weights at this https URL.
Comments: Code and model weights available at this https URL
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.26493 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2606.26493v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26493
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Fitsum Reda [view email]
[v1] Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:52:44 UTC (1,149 KB)
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