A Theoretical Analysis of Why Masked Diffusion Models Mitigate the Reversal Curse
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2602. 02470v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many complex tasks, yet they can still fail in very simple logical reasoning such as the "reversal curse" -- when trained on forward knowledge data of the form "$A \rightarrow B$" (e.
The study investigates how post‑training of large autoregressive language models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) affects their internal computation. Across two 7B ARM‑MDM families and four diagnostic tasks, the authors find that MDMs retain much of the ARM’s high‑attribution pathways on prefix‑dominant tasks, but reorganize computation toward earlier layers on globally constrained tasks. Component‑level probes reveal that ARMs depend on sharply specialized components, whereas MDMs show weaker specialization and more diffuse output‑space alignment.
arXiv:2606. 06712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transformation of autoregressive models (ARLMs) into diffusion language models (DLMs).
arXiv:2607. 15893v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While the internal mechanisms of autoregressive (AR) transformers have been studied extensively, much less is known about diffusion language models (DLMs), an emerging alternative that generates text by iterative denoising.
arXiv:2606. 00091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have reshaped self-supervised representation learning in vision.
arXiv:2601. 22947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text by unmasking tokens in parallel and have recently emerged as alternatives to autoregressive language models.