arXiv AI

Simple Policy Gradients for Reasoning with Diffusion Language Models

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Enhancing Reasoning for Diffusion LLMs via Distribution Matching Policy Optimization

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 Machine Learning
Jun 2

d2: Improving Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory 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.

By Guanghan Wang, Gilad Turok, Yair Schiff, Marianne Arriola, Volodymyr Kuleshov
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

A Continuous-Time Reinforcement Learning Framework for Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models

arXiv:2607. 14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time with discrete state spaces and possibly arbitrary action spaces via a stochastic control approach, where the state dynamics are modeled as a controlled continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC).

By Zikun Zhang, Jiayuan Sheng, David D. Yao, Wenpin Tang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Advantage Collapse in Group Relative Policy Optimization: Diagnosis and Mitigation

arXiv:2605. 21125v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a prominent algorithm within the Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework, has achieved strong results in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

By Xixiang He, Qiyao Sun, Ao Cheng, Xingming Li, Xuanyu Ji, Hailun Lu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu
arXiv AI
Jul 7

dOPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2607. 04428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising a masked sequence, offering a parallel alternative to autoregressive models, but eliciting strong reasoning through post-training remains difficult: supervised fine-tuning is off-policy and suffers from exposure bias, while reinforcement learning gives only sparse, sequence-level rewards and is hard to apply without tractable sequence likelihoods.

By Phuong Tuan Dat, Qi Li, Xinchao Wang