arXiv AI

CaLR: Causal Latent Revision for Robust Diffusion Reasoning

CaLR: Causal Latent Revision for Robust Diffusion Reasoning proposes a framework that combines autoregressive and diffusion language models by reformulating reasoning as constrained latent optimization. The method uses a causal topology matrix from an expert model and implicit differentiation to perform gradient-guided thought revision, enforcing logical consistency and allowing dynamic self-correction of intermediate steps during parallel generation. Empirical results show CaLR achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on complex benchmarks, surpassing strong autoregressive baselines and demonstrating superior robustness in constrained tasks such as Sudoku.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

DCGC: Draft-Conditioned Global Correction for Complex Reasoning with Masked Diffusion Models

DCGC is a Masked Diffusion Model framework that performs global correction of flawed reasoning traces in Large Language Models. It uses an imperfect solution draft from an upstream solver as auxiliary context and combines task‑specific supervised fine‑tuning with a Dynamic Dual‑CFG inference mechanism that separates problem‑only and joint problem‑draft branches. Experiments on math, code, and knowledge reasoning benchmarks show that DCGC outperforms standard sampling and simpler CFG variants, and it can improve full test‑set accuracy even when ground‑truth failure labels are unavailable.

By Minhae Oh, Nakyung Lee, Jungwoo Lee
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Test-Time Scaling with Diffusion Language Models via Reward-Guided Stitching

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.

By Roy Miles, Aysim Toker, Andreea-Maria Oncescu, Jiankang Deng, Ismail Elezi
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Flow Reasoning Models: Turning Flows Into Efficient Recurrent Reasoners

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.

By Alec Helbling, Andrey Bryutkin, Mauro Martino, Duen Horng Chau, Nima Dehmamy, Hendrik Strobelt
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
Oct 2

Hierarchical Continuous Diffusion Language Models

Hierarchical Continuous Diffusion Language Models (HC‑DLM) combine discrete token generation with a continuous latent trajectory in a single denoising process, addressing the independence bottleneck of parallel decoding in discrete diffusion models. The training objective is derived from a variational bound on token likelihood, and the latent state is the sole persistent generative element, with tokens read out and fed back at each step. Experiments on Sudoku, Countdown, and LM1B show HC‑DLM outperforming both discrete and continuous diffusion baselines in puzzle accuracy and generative perplexity.

By Hui Ren, Zihan Li, Chang Liu, Huidong Liu, Alexander Schwing
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Latent Reasoning with Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2606. 06447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often improve reasoning by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), demonstrating the importance of intermediate computation.

By Guancheng Tu, Xiangjun Fu, Suhao Yu, Yao Tang, Haoqiang Kang, Lianhui Qin, Yizhe Zhang, Jiatao Gu