Research on diffusion-based text classification is surprisingly nascent—only 5 core papers directly apply diffusion models to text classification tasks, despite the explosion of diffusion work in NLP for generation. The field emerged in 2022-2024, with ROIC-DM (2024) being the first to use diffusion directly as a text classifier. However, foundational work on diffusion classifiers in computer vision (2021-2023) established the theoretical framework, and discrete diffusion models like D3PM provide the technical foundations for text applications. Most papers focus on adversarial robustness and uncertainty quantification rather than pure accuracy gains, suggesting diffusion's strength lies in providing more reliable, robust classification.
The most significant finding is how limited this research area remains. Between 2021-2025, only a handful of papers explicit