# The Design Space of Tri-Modal Masked Diffusion Models — retained record > Retained news record from news:apple-ml-research. Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/fc374cfa367faa04 [← sources](https://highsignal.app/data) source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:apple-ml-research) published 2026-10-14 00:00 ingested 2026-10-24 09:57 [original source ↗](https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/tri-modal-masked-diffusion) ## retained text ``` View publication 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 reparameterization, eliminating the need for tuning the optimal batch size as reported in recent work. This reparameterization decouples the physical batch size, often chosen based on compute (GPU saturation, FLOP-efficiency, wall-clock time) from the logical batch size, chosen to balance the variance of gradients during stochastic optimization. Finally, we pretrain a preliminary model showcasing the capabilities of a unified design, achieving strong results at 3B model scale (6.4T tokens), in both text generation, T2I tasks, and T2S tasks. Our work represents the largest scale systematic open study of multimodal discrete diffusion models conducted to date, providing valuable insights into scaling behaviors across multiple modalities. Related readings and updates. Target Concrete Score Matching: A Holistic Framework for Discrete Diffusion July 11, 2025research area Methods and Algorithms, research area Speech and Natural Language Processingconference ICML Discrete diffusion is a promising framework for modeling and generating discrete data. In this work, we present Target Concrete Score Matching (TCSM), a novel and versatile objective for training and fine-tuning discrete diffusion models. TCSM provides a general framework with broad applicability. It supports pre-training discrete diffusion models directly from data samples, and many existing discrete diffusion approaches naturally emerge as… Read more How to Scale Your EMA December 4, 2023research area Methods and Algorithmsconference NeurIPS *Equal Contributors Preserving training dynamics across batch sizes is an important tool for practical machine learning as it enables the trade-off between batch size and wall-clock time. This trade-off is typically enabled by a scaling rule; for example, in stochastic gradient descent, one should scale the learning rate linearly with the batch size. Another important machine learning tool is the model EMA, a functional copy of a target model… Read more ``` document fetched 2026-10-24 09:56