arXiv:2510. 04019v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) represent a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs; however, the lack of effective post-training techniques, including reinforcement learning (RL), remains a key challenge for dLLMs, especially for downstream applications.
By Anthony Zhan
arXiv:2607. 15200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has proven effective for improving reasoning in large language models, but extending it to Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) remains challenging due to the intractability of the log-likelihood estimation.
By Haran Raajesh, Kulin Shah, Adam Klivans, Philipp Kr\"ahenb\"uhl
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:2601. 15165v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders.
By Zanlin Ni, Shenzhi Wang, Yang Yue, Tianyu Yu, Weilin Zhao, Yeguo Hua, Tianyi Chen, Jun Song, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng, Gao Huang
arXiv:2610.02193v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive generation for tasks demanding bidirectional reasoning and global...
By Hui Ren, Zihan Li, Chang Liu, Huidong Liu, Alexander Schwing
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:2609.16372v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked tokens with bidirectional attention. Extending reasoning across...
By Albert Ge, Chandan Singh, Yufan Zhuang, Xiaodong Liu, Jianfeng Gao, Frederic Sala
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:2606. 19475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks.
By Thomas Bertolani, Davide Bucciarelli, Leonardo Zini, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi
arXiv:2504. 18587v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, as demonstrated by systems such as OpenAI's O1~\cite{o1} and DeepSeek-R1~\cite{r1}.
By Tianbing Xu
Constrained decoding is essential for serving LLMs, ensuring that generated outputs follow specific structures such as JSON schema-formatted function calls. Existing systems are designed for autoregressive models and assume left-to-right generation, masking out invalid next tokens at each step.
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