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: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
arXiv:2606. 29275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are typically trained under fixed context structures, restricting denoising to predetermined token subsets.
By Gagan Jain
The paper introduces a trajectory-level speculative decoding framework for diffusion-based language models (dLLMs), addressing the limitation of existing strategies that revert to single-token generation when confidence is low. By constructing draft denoising trajectories through confidence-stratified tree exploration and verifying them with blockwise parallel evaluation and bidirectional attention masking, the method also incorporates inter-block speculation to exploit the models’ bidirectional structure. Experiments show a 30–40% reduction in denoising iterations, a token-per-step increase from 2.6 to 4.3, and a 7–14× speedup over vanilla dLLMs while maintaining accuracy within 1% on reasoning and code benchmarks.
By Tianxiang Pan, Baitao Gong, Mo Guang, Hongwei Yong, Tianpeng Jiang, Yaqian Li, Zheng Cao, Kaiwen Long
arXiv:2605. 29233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising multiple token positions in parallel, offering an attractive alternative to strictly autoregressive decoding.
By Xiaoyou Wu, Cheng-Jhih Shih, Binfei Ji, Yong Liu, Yingyan Celine Lin
The paper introduces PILL, a new infilling technique for diffusion language models that eliminates the need for a preset initial length and reduces inference overhead. PILL uses probing-based length-free decoding, cutting down on extra forward passes and speeding up generation. Experiments across five diffusion models and eight benchmarks show PILL outperforms the strongest baseline with higher pass rates and BLEU-2 scores while running 1.82× faster.
By Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Yuchen Yan, Dongqi Fu, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong