arXiv Computation and Language

LOCKR: A Hidden-State Trajectory-Guided Planner for Detecting and Repairing Stable-but-Wrong Lock-In in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

DCGC: Draft-Conditioned Global Correction for Complex Reasoning with Masked Diffusion Models

DCGC is a Masked Diffusion Model framework that performs global correction of flawed reasoning traces in Large Language Models. It uses an imperfect solution draft from an upstream solver as auxiliary context and combines task‑specific supervised fine‑tuning with a Dynamic Dual‑CFG inference mechanism that separates problem‑only and joint problem‑draft branches. Experiments on math, code, and knowledge reasoning benchmarks show that DCGC outperforms standard sampling and simpler CFG variants, and it can improve full test‑set accuracy even when ground‑truth failure labels are unavailable.

By Minhae Oh, Nakyung Lee, Jungwoo Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Breaking Diffusion: Parallel Reasoning with Draft Refinement

Draft Refinement Language Models (DRLMs) propose parallel revisions to a draft answer using a single denoiser that reconstructs every token from uniformly corrupted drafts, enabling both preservation and repair of tokens. The model evaluates each candidate draft by estimating a cavity energy from forward predictions, selecting revisions that lower this energy without a separate scoring model. Experiments on Countdown, Sudoku-Extreme, and Maze-Hard show DRLM outperforming autoregressive and discrete diffusion baselines, achieving 44.4% on Countdown-5 and 93.9% on Sudoku-Extreme with 6M parameters.

By Jaesang Yu, Seoyeon Byun, Yun Wang, Yan Lu, Juho Kim
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Test-Time Scaling with Diffusion Language Models via Reward-Guided Stitching

The paper introduces Stitching Noisy Diffusion Thoughts, a self‑consistency framework that transforms low‑cost diffusion‑sampled reasoning into a reusable pool of step‑level candidates. By sampling many diverse trajectories with a masked diffusion language model, scoring each intermediate step with a process reward model, and stitching the highest‑quality steps across trajectories, the method recomputes only the final answer, separating exploration from evaluation. Experiments on math reasoning benchmarks show that step‑level recombination improves accuracy by up to 23.8% on six tasks while reducing latency by up to 1.8× compared to traditional diffusion models and unified architectures.

By Roy Miles, Aysim Toker, Andreea-Maria Oncescu, Jiankang Deng, Ismail Elezi
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Less Uniform Discrete Diffusion is More Powerful and Scalable

The paper introduces Less Uniform Diffusion (LUDI), a framework that improves uniform diffusion language models by using a less uniform loss and per-token time embeddings to guide reverse transitions and enable confidence-based few-step sampling. Experiments demonstrate that LUDI provides cleaner supervision, enhances few-step generation, and scales to a 7B model (LUDI-7B) that achieves a 3-token-per-step speedup over autoregressive decoding while matching masked diffusion baselines. The work suggests that UDLMs still have untapped potential for complex generation tasks.

By Kaibo Wang, Ding Ding, Fangyu Ding, Zijin Feng, Han Shi, Haili Bai, Jiacheng Sun, Yang Xiang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

CaLR: Causal Latent Revision for Robust Diffusion Reasoning

CaLR: Causal Latent Revision for Robust Diffusion Reasoning proposes a framework that combines autoregressive and diffusion language models by reformulating reasoning as constrained latent optimization. The method uses a causal topology matrix from an expert model and implicit differentiation to perform gradient-guided thought revision, enforcing logical consistency and allowing dynamic self-correction of intermediate steps during parallel generation. Empirical results show CaLR achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on complex benchmarks, surpassing strong autoregressive baselines and demonstrating superior robustness in constrained tasks such as Sudoku.

By Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Xuelong Li