OrderGPT: Generation Order as a Learnable Modeling Choice

Abstract

Generative modeling of discrete data has two popular paradigms: autoregressive models such as GPT, which factorize a sequence in a left-to-right (L2R) order, and masked diffusion models, which are essentially any-order autoregressive modeling. Rather than competing methods, these are the two extreme points of a single axis – the generation order. For structured discrete domains without a natural traversal, both extremes may be suboptimal, yet the intermediate choice – a single well-adapted order – remains largely unexplored. We introduce OrderGPT, which builds on Any-Order GPT to learn a task-level generation order without canonical-order supervision. Our key observation is that predicting variables from randomly sampled reveal prefixes produces recurring attention patterns in the backbone that provide a model-dependent signal of predictive dependencies. We aggregate this signal into a reciprocal dependency graph and use a spectral teacher to derive continuous generation priorities. A lightweight OrderMLP integrated into the GPT backbone learns to predict these priorities from attention, incorporating order learning into the architecture within a single training run. Training gradually shifts toward the learned order, which is then frozen for subsequent autoregressive training and generation. The same mechanism adapts across modalities: adaptively it recovers near-L2R dependency structure in language, learns anatomically organized factorizations on human pose, and discovers a factorization on tabular data that places statistically and semantically related fields nearby, while improving downstream modeling metrics across all domains. The code is available at https://github.com/Chenhe-yang/OrderGPT/.