DreamingGoose: Staged Distillation from Autoregressive Transformers to Bidirectional Recurrent Diffusion Language Models

Pretrained autoregressive Transformers represent a large sunk investment in compute. Existing conversion methods reuse that investment by changing either the architecture (attention to recurrence) or the objective (next-token prediction to denoising), never both. We convert Qwen3 teachers at 1.7B an