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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
arXiv:2605. 25638v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policy loss estimation remains a fundamental and long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for diffusion language models (DLMs).
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to unmasked context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning.
arXiv:2605. 13026v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling.
arXiv:2510. 19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reasoning paradigm, where language models reason before answering, has enabled breakthroughs on tasks such as mathematical problem-solving.
arXiv:2606. 27617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) promise fast, parallel language generation, but their reverse transition factorises across token positions -- an approximation that breaks down in the few-step sampling regime where parallel generation ought to provide the greatest efficiency gains.
arXiv:2609.37974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate text by unmasking several tokens per step, but they are trained and sampled under different conditions. The m...