arXiv AI

On Trajectory-Aware Training for Masked Diffusion Language Models

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
Sep 3

Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces PILL, a new infilling technique for diffusion language models that eliminates the need for a preset initial length and reduces inference overhead. PILL uses probing-based length-free decoding, cutting down on extra forward passes and speeding up generation. Experiments across five diffusion models and eight benchmarks show PILL outperforms the strongest baseline with higher pass rates and BLEU-2 scores while running 1.82× faster.

By Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Yuchen Yan, Dongqi Fu, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Zarya: A Hybrid Autoregressive--Masked Diffusion Language Model with Flexible Training and Dual-Mode Inference

Zarya is a hybrid language model that jointly trains an autoregressive objective and a masked-diffusion objective within a single architecture. It structures training data into variable-size slots and uses a curriculum that gradually increases slot granularity, allowing a smooth transition from fine-grained AR learning to coarse-grained diffusion learning. At inference, Zarya offers two decoding modes—MDM sampling with first-hitting denoising and slotted speculative decoding that interleaves diffusion-based selection with autoregressive infilling—while fully decoupling training and inference regimes and supporting extensive configurability.

By Leonid Sinev, Ilya Koziev, Vladislav Leshchuk
arXiv AI
Jun 3

$R^2$-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models via Spatio-Temporal Redundancy Reduction

arXiv:2604. 18995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction.

By Zhenbang Du, Kejing Xia, Xinrui Zhong, Yonggan Fu, Nicolai Oswald, Binfei Ji, Brucek Khailany, Pavlo Molchanov, Yingyan Lin