The Design Space of Tri-Modal Masked Diffusion Models

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as strong alternatives to autoregressive language models, with recent work initializing and finetuning a base unimodal model for bi-modal generation. Diverging from previous approaches, we introduce the first tri-modal Masked Diffusion Models (MDM) pretrained from scratch on text, image-text, and audio-text data. We systematically analyze multimodal scaling laws, modality mixing ratios, noise schedules, batch-size effects and provide optimized inference sampling defaults. Our batch-size analysis yields a novel stochastic differential equation (SDE) based…