arXiv Machine Learning

d2: Improving Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Likelihood Estimation

arXiv:2509. 21474v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Enhancing Reasoning for Diffusion LLMs via Distribution Matching Policy Optimization

arXiv:2510. 08233v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput.

By Yuchen Zhu, Wei Guo, Jaemoo Choi, Petr Molodyk, Bo Yuan, Molei Tao, Yongxin Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Towards Efficient Reasoning: Learning Causal Shortcuts for Diffusion Language Models

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.

By Dian Jin, Kairong Han, Baohong Li, Xinpeng Dong, Zijing Hu, Nuanqiao Shan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
arXiv AI
Jul 2

Diffusion-GR2: Diffusion Generative Reasoning Re-ranker

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.

By Zhuoxuan Zhang (Yang), Kangqi Ni (Yang), Yuhang Chen (Yang), Mingfu Liang (Yang), Xiaohan Wei (Yang), Yunchen Pu (Yang), Fei Tian (Yang), Chonglin Sun (Yang), Frank Shyu (Yang), Adam (Yang), Song, Sandeep Pandey, Luke Simon, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
arXiv AI
3d ago

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