Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes.
arXiv:2604. 18738v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, filling multiple masked positions at each step.
By Lin Yao
arXiv:2606. 10829v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models can reduce inference steps by revealing multiple tokens per denoising iteration, but this parallelism is fragile: positions that are individually confident may be unsafe to commit together when their predictions are coupled.
By Yusuf Sahin, Ahmed Rockey Saikia, Volkan Cevher, Paolo Favaro
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
arXiv:2606. 29228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the capability of parallel decoding, diffusion large language models (dLLMs) require many denoising steps to maintain generation quality, motivating recent research on efficient decoding strategies.
By Hengxiang Zhang, Jiaxi Ren, Hongxin Wei
arXiv:2606. 11552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation.
By Lexington Whalen, Yuki Ito, Ryo Sakamoto
arXiv:2606. 04446v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in a single target-model forward pass.
By Liyuan Zhang, Jiarui Zhang, Jinwei Yao, Ran Yan, Yuchen Yang, Jiahao Zhang, Tongkai Yang, Yi Wu, Binhang Yuan
arXiv:2604. 09921v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Much work has been done on designing fast and accurate sampling for diffusion language models (dLLMs).
By Theo X. Olausson, Metod Jazbec, Xi Wang, Armando Solar-Lezama, Christian A. Naesseth, Stephan Mandt, Eric Nalisnick
arXiv:2606. 04236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models can generate text efficiently by updating multiple masked positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a quality-latency trade-off.
By Giries Abu Ayoub, Mario Barbara, Llu\'is Pastor-P\'erez, Tanja Bien, Aneesh Barthakur, Alaa Maalouf, Loay Mualem
arXiv:2606. 02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding.
By Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang
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:2609.16450v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising parallel decoding paradigm as an alternative to autoregressive generation through iterative...
By Lixuan Wei, Wei Zhou, Jianwen Wu, Yipeng Shen, Meiling Wang, Haoran You