arXiv AI

Induction in Both Directions: A Mechanistic Analysis of In-Context Learning in Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2607. 15893v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While the internal mechanisms of autoregressive (AR) transformers have been studied extensively, much less is known about diffusion language models (DLMs), an emerging alternative that generates text by iterative denoising.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Window-Diffusion: Accelerating Diffusion Language Model Inference with Windowed Token Pruning and Caching

The paper introduces Window-Diffusion, a method that accelerates diffusion language model inference by pruning and caching tokens within a sliding window. It categorizes undecoded tokens into active, buffer, and far-field groups, computing only the first two while discarding the rest. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream demonstrate up to 99× speedup with minimal loss in generation quality.

By Fengrui Zuo, Zhiwei Ke, Yiming Liu, Wenqi Lou, Chao Wang, Xuehai Zhou
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Informed Masking: Structure-Aware Perturbation for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Large Language Models

Informed Masking (IM) is a new technique for aligning Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL). It identifies a systematic upstream/downstream token structure in dLLM rollouts and shows that masking downstream tokens creates better subproblems for likelihood estimation. When integrated into three state‑of‑the‑art dLLM RL methods on LLaDA‑8B‑Instruct, IM yields up to 2.01%, 8.68%, and 5.77% relative average gains on math and planning benchmarks while improving training stability.

By Xiaoyi Yu, Enver Sangineto, Pei Fu, Fiorenzo Parascandolo, Wenhui Tan, Ruikang Zhang, Rita Cucchiara, Ruihua Song, Jian Luan
arXiv AI
Jun 2

SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606. 02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding.

By Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Masks Can Be Distracting: On Context Comprehension in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2511. 21338v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation.

By Julianna Piskorz, Cristina Pinneri, Alvaro Correia, Motasem Alfarra, Risheek Garrepalli, Christos Louizos
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2601. 22954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel.

By Yuezhou Hu, Harman Singh, Monishwaran Maheswaran, Haocheng Xi, Coleman Hooper, Jintao Zhang, Aditya Tomar, Michael W. Mahoney, Sewon Min, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami, Chenfeng Xu