arXiv AI
Sep 30

Reliable Parallel Decoding in Masked Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces Reliable Parallel Decoding (RPD) for masked diffusion language models, addressing the unreliability of committing multiple predictions from a single forward pass. Diagnostics reveal that confidence alone is insufficient, as confident end‑sequence predictions can preempt necessary upstream computations, and downstream predictions degrade with upstream uncertainty. RPD selects candidates based on layer‑wise stability and final confidence, committing them under an entropy budget while deferring uncertain predictions, achieving superior throughput and competitive accuracy on LLaDA and Dream benchmarks.

By Zhenghao He, Bohan Liu, Guangzhi Xiong, Aidong Zhang