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Comment by VoidWhisperer | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a super deep understanding of the underlying algorithms involved, but going off the demo and that page, is this mainly a model for image related tasks, or could it also be trained to do things like what GPT/Claude/etc does (chat conversations)?

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Yes, it's absolutely possible—just like how diffusion LLMs work, we can do the same with DDN LLMs.

I made an initial attempt to combine [DDN with GPT](https://github.com/Discrete-Distribution-Networks/Discrete-D...), aiming to remove tokenizers and let LLMs directly model binary strings. In each forward pass, the model adaptively adjusts the byte length of generated content based on generation difficulty (naturally supporting speculative sampling).

This is what I find most impressive, that it's a natural hierarchial method which seems so general, yet is actually quite competitive. I feel like the machine learning community has been looking for that for a long time. Non-generative uses (like hierarchial embeddings, maybe? Making Dewey's decimal like embeddings for anything!) are even more exciting.

Exactly! The paragraph on Efficient Data Compression Capability in the original paper also highlights:

> To our knowledge, Taiji-DDN is the first generative model capable of directly transforming data into a semantically meaningful binary string which represents a leaf node on a balanced binary tree.

This property excites me just as much.

This sounds a bit like H-Net [1] or Byte Latent Transformer [2].

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07955

2: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09871

I vouched for this comment. Your account seems to be shadow banned, but your last comments look fine to me, so you maybe want to email dang to revoke that status ..

Thanks. I sent an email.

It does seem that way — we’re both trying to overcome the limitations imposed by LLM tokenization to achieve a truly end-to-end model.

And, their work is far more polished; I’ve only put together a quick GPT+DDN proof-of-concept.

Thank you for sharing.

The posts mentions that: https://github.com/Discrete-Distribution-Networks/Discrete-D...

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