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.
arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.
arXiv:2607. 01170v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative reasoning re-rankers achieve strong recommendation accuracy by emitting a chain-of-thought before re-ordering a candidate list, but they are slow at inference: an autoregressive (AR) decoder spends one sequential forward pass per reasoning token, and the reasoning trace far exceeds the ranking it produces.
CanvasAnneal is a curriculum‑guided reinforcement learning framework designed to improve Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) on complex reasoning and tool‑use tasks. It starts training by injecting reasoning traces from a stronger teacher model into the diffusion canvas, then gradually reduces this guidance so the model learns to generate reasoning independently. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool‑use benchmarks show that CanvasAnneal outperforms standard diffusion RL methods such as diffu‑GRPO on tasks like MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2, and accelerates reward improvement, though the gains vary by task.
The paper introduces Causal Shortcut Learning (CSL), a framework that identifies token chains—called causal shortcuts—that guide Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) toward correct reasoning paths. By extracting these shortcuts and applying parallel prioritized masking during training, CSL improves both convergence speed and generation accuracy. Experiments on several reasoning benchmarks and two base models show CSL outperforms existing SFT-variant baselines, achieving an average 1.92% improvement over SFT-only models and up to 4.20% on MATH-500.
arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.
The paper introduces a test‑time compute allocation framework for block diffusion language models, featuring Bounded Adaptive Confidence Decoding (BACD) for step‑wise adaptive denoising and the Think Coarse, Critic Fine (TCCF) paradigm for block‑wise generation. BACD dynamically adjusts denoising based on model confidence to accelerate inference while limiting error accumulation. TCCF allocates larger blocks for exploratory thinking and smaller blocks for precise refinement, with Progressive Block Size Extension stabilizing training across varying block sizes. Experiments on six benchmarks show the TDAR‑8B model achieves a 2.38× speedup and +3.4% average accuracy over the TraDo‑8B baseline.
arXiv:2603. 01331v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising a masked sequence.
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.
arXiv:2510. 19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reasoning paradigm, where language models reason before answering, has enabled breakthroughs on tasks such as mathematical problem-solving.
The paper investigates test‑time scaling for language models, noting that sequential methods often stall due to entering attractors—sets of answers that block further exploration. Across 27 experiments, over half of sequential trajectories hit an attractor within four iterations. Introducing a simple model‑mixing intervention reduces attractor incidence by 21.2 percentage points, expands solution coverage beyond a compute‑matched parallel baseline, and boosts recursive self‑aggregation accuracy by at least 2.2 percentage points.
arXiv:2608. 10928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by allocating additional inference-time compute to generate extended chain-of-thought reasoning.
Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs) are a new framework that turns continuous flow models into efficient recurrent reasoners for structured tasks. By self‑conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, FRMs iteratively refine solutions, allowing parallel decision making and revision. The authors introduce Fixed‑Point Forcing (FPF) to mitigate exposure bias at deeper recursion, and report near‑perfect solve rates on Sudoku‑Extreme, Zebra, and Maze‑Unique, outperforming existing masked‑diffusion and specialized baselines while using far fewer inference FLOPs.