The paper introduces Corrective Diffusion Language Models (CDLMs), which enhance masked diffusion language models by explicitly supervising visible corrupted tokens to enable confidence-guided refinement of incorrect tokens. Experiments show that this correction-oriented post‑training improves iterative refinement and parallel decoding across models ranging from 0.5B to 8B, outperforming standard masked‑diffusion fine‑tuning on benchmarks such as Code Revision, HumanEval(+), and MATH. The authors also provide a new Code Revision Benchmark and release code and data for reproducibility.
arXiv:2604. 18738v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, filling multiple masked positions at each step.
arXiv:2605. 26436v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Discrete masked diffusion language models such as LLaDA generate text through iterative denoising, where mask tokens are progressively replaced with predicted tokens.
arXiv:2606. 12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation.
CoDR (Confidence Drift Remasking) is a training‑free, sampler‑agnostic refinement pass for masked diffusion language models that detects and corrects early token commitments that become unsupported as context grows denser. It estimates confidence drift for all committed positions using only a few forward passes and remasks only the tokens whose confidence has dropped, thereby improving accuracy across multiple backbones, tasks, and samplers with modest computational overhead.
Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes.
arXiv:2606. 16847v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising avenue for parallel generation but face a trade-off between decoding speed and quality.
The paper introduces Lookahead Editing (LED), a method that enhances masked diffusion language models (MDMs) by adding a rewritable proposal state. LED performs multiple lookahead updates at each decoding step to refine future predictions before committing tokens, thereby improving expressivity while retaining MDMs’ simple transition schedule. Fine‑tuned LED models (LED‑7B and LED‑8B) achieve significant performance gains on eight benchmarks and outperform larger models such as LLaDA2.1‑16B using only supervised fine‑tuning.
Forward-Free Diffusion Language Models with BPTT-Free Looped Refinement (FReDA) removes the need for a hand‑designed forward process in diffusion language modeling by treating model‑generated drafts as implicit intermediate states and refining them recursively. The approach detaches earlier refinement passes, backpropagating only through the final pass, and supports both self‑refinement and Best‑of‑N candidate selection. In sub‑8B experiments, FReDA‑4B surpasses larger diffusion baselines on reasoning and coding tasks, achieving up to 15% absolute gains and a 1.5‑1.8× speedup while scaling well with additional refinement steps.
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.
The paper investigates whether the locate‑then‑edit approach for knowledge editing, previously applied only to autoregressive language models, can be transferred to masked diffusion models (MDMs). It finds that the optimal edit location—an early‑to‑mid‑layer MLP at the last subject token—remains the same for both model types, but that MDMs suffer a sharper decline in performance when editing longer, multi‑token facts. By incorporating intermediate partially‑unmasked states into the edit optimization, the authors restore multi‑token editing performance in MDMs.
arXiv:2602. 11590v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation while achieving competitive performance.
arXiv:2608. 13925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) accelerate language generation by predicting multiple masks in a single forward pass.