arXiv Computation and Language

A Theoretical Analysis of Why Masked Diffusion Models Mitigate the Reversal Curse

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Mechanism Shift During Post-training from Autoregressive to Masked Diffusion Language Models

The study investigates how post‑training of large autoregressive language models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) affects their internal computation. Across two 7B ARM‑MDM families and four diagnostic tasks, the authors find that MDMs retain much of the ARM’s high‑attribution pathways on prefix‑dominant tasks, but reorganize computation toward earlier layers on globally constrained tasks. Component‑level probes reveal that ARMs depend on sharply specialized components, whereas MDMs show weaker specialization and more diffuse output‑space alignment.

By Injin Kong, Hyoungjoon Lee, Yohan Jo
arXiv AI
Jul 28

LEDOM: Reverse Language Model

arXiv:2507. 01335v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive language models are trained exclusively left-to-right.

By Xunjian Yin, Sitao Cheng, Yuxi Xie, Xinyu Hu, Li Lin, Xinyi Wang, Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang, Xiaojun Wan
arXiv Computation and Language
21h ago

ECHO: Emergent Common-Mode Hidden Offsets Drive Vocabulary Collapse in Preference Optimization

arXiv:2610.29410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference optimization can improve every ranking metric while building a hidden, shared representation shift that the relative loss barely sees, one t...

By Yun Li, Ehsan Javanmardi, Simon Thompson, Jiachen Gong, Qunli Zhang, Zifan Zeng, Shiming Liu, Peng Wang, Zixuan Guo, Manabu Tsukada
arXiv Computation and Language
21h ago

Hierarchical Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2610.29255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models have emerged as an alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation. However, standard masked...

By Parul Gupta, Satwik, Avni Aggarwal, Bhavesh Gurnani, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Dinesh Khandelwal, Dinesh Garg, Parag Singla