arXiv:2605. 08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored.
arXiv:2605.13043v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models(DLMs) provide a promising alternative to autoregressive language models through iterative denoising and bidirectional gen...
This paper investigates safety alignment in diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which generate text via iterative denoising instead of left‑to‑right decoding. By tracking token distributions and commitment decisions across denoising steps, the authors find that refusal signals are concentrated early in the denoising process and at leading response positions, and that early committed tokens strongly influence the final safety outcome. They introduce Refusal‑Aware Early Commitment (RAEC), a training‑free decoding method that preserves early refusal signals, and demonstrate that RAEC reduces attack success rates on LLaDA and Dream while largely maintaining utility.
arXiv:2604. 18738v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, filling multiple masked positions at each step.
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.
The paper proposes a framework that explains why jailbreak attacks succeed against diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) by viewing safety alignment as shaping a denoising energy landscape. It identifies two attack strategies—obscuring the query’s safety disposition at initialization or forcing the denoising path across an energy barrier mid‑trajectory—and introduces three training‑free detection signals that monitor initial safety disposition and kinetic energy in complementary subspaces. Experiments on several dense and sparse dLLMs show that these signals complement each other, and any attack that evades detection also fails to produce harmful content.
Decoupled Safety Control (DSC) is a plug‑in algorithm that improves training‑free safety guidance for diffusion models by separating the unsafe condition from the intervention process. Unlike existing coupled safety‑control chains, DSC determines the intervention based on the current generation state, reducing residual unsafe content and preserving benign‑generation quality. Experiments on standard safety benchmarks demonstrate that DSC achieves stronger unsafe‑content suppression while maintaining efficient inference.
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: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...
The paper investigates how diffusion models, even after fine‑tuning to unlearn harmful concepts, still retain a linear residual of those concepts in token embeddings. It introduces SubAttack, a jailbreak method that extracts this residual by learning orthogonal attack tokens composed of interpretable textual elements, and SubDefense, a plug‑and‑play defense that projects out the same subspace to suppress the residual. Experiments show SubAttack outperforms prior attacks in power and transferability, while SubDefense offers stronger robustness and better preservation of safe generation quality.
arXiv:2606. 01024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete Masked diffusion language models generate text by iterative parallel decoding, but few-step decoding suffers from a tradeoff between length and quality: with a fixed step budget, standard methods can generate a short, high-quality output, or they can produce long but repetitive text.
arXiv:2610.19563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment of text-to-image diffusion models aims to suppress harmful content without compromising useful generation capabilities. However, prefe...