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Related papers: Test-Time Scaling in Diffusion LLMs via Hidden Sem…

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Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain

Test-time scaling investigates whether a fixed diffusion language model (DLM) can generate better outputs when given more inference compute, without additional training. However, naive best-of-$K$ sampling is fundamentally limited because…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for language modeling, yet the effective design of transformer architectures for MDMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sanghyun Lee , Chunsan Hong , Seungryong Kim , Jonghyun Lee , Jongho Park , Dongmin Park

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) refine token generations through iterative denoising, but answers often stabilize before all steps complete. We propose EDIT (Early Diffusion Inference Termination), an inference-time criterion…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-02 He-Yen Hsieh , Hong Wang , H. T. Kung

Discrete diffusion models have recently become competitive with autoregressive models for language modeling, even outperforming them on reasoning tasks requiring planning and global coherence, but they require more computation at inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Andre He , Sean Welleck , Daniel Fried

Under strictly controlled pre-training settings, we observe a Crossover: when unique data is limited, diffusion language models (DLMs) consistently surpass autoregressive (AR) models by training for more epochs. The crossover shifts later…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Jinjie Ni , Qian Liu , Longxu Dou , Chao Du , Zili Wang , Hang Yan , Tianyu Pang , Michael Qizhe Shieh

Large language models have achieved remarkable success under the autoregressive paradigm, yet high-quality text generation need not be tied to a fixed left-to-right order. Existing alternatives still struggle to jointly achieve generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hongcan Guo , Qinyu Zhao , Yian Zhao , Shen Nie , Rui Zhu , Qiushan Guo , Feng Wang , Tao Yang , Hengshuang Zhao , Guoqiang Wei , Yan Zeng

Sequential recommender systems have achieved significant success in modeling temporal user behavior but remain limited in capturing rich user semantics beyond interaction patterns. Large Language Models (LLMs) present opportunities to…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text via iterative denoising but consistently underperform on multi-step reasoning. We hypothesize this gap stems from a coordination problem: AR models build coherence token-by-token, while…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Earl J St Sauver

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have inspired new paradigms for document reranking. While this paradigm better exploits the reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, most existing LLM-based rerankers rely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qi Liu , Kun Ai , Jiaxin Mao , Yanzhao Zhang , Mingxin Li , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Fengbin Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen

The safety and alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) are critical for their responsible deployment. Current evaluation methods predominantly focus on identifying and preventing overtly harmful outputs. However, they often fail to…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the long-dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm, offering a parallelable decoding process that could yield greater efficiency. Yet, in practice, current open-source…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Han Peng , Peiyu Liu , Zican Dong , Daixuan Cheng , Junyi Li , Yiru Tang , Shuo Wang , Wayne Xin Zhao

We study the scaling properties of latent diffusion models (LDMs) with an emphasis on their sampling efficiency. While improved network architecture and inference algorithms have shown to effectively boost sampling efficiency of diffusion…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Kangfu Mei , Zhengzhong Tu , Mauricio Delbracio , Hossein Talebi , Vishal M. Patel , Peyman Milanfar

Test-time scaling (TTS) -- the dynamic allocation of compute during inference -- is a promising direction for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, a systematic comparison of well-known TTS strategies under identical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Aradhye Agarwal , Ayan Sengupta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Inference-time scaling has emerged as an effective way to improve generative models at test time by using a verifier to score and select candidate outputs. A common choice is to employ Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as verifiers,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Davide Bucciarelli , Evelyn Turri , Lorenzo Baraldi , Marcella Cornia , Lorenzo Baraldi , Rita Cucchiara

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) approaches, enabling parallel token generation beyond a rigid left-to-right order. Despite growing empirical success, the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yunxiao Zhao , Changxiao Cai

Inference-time compute has re-emerged as a practical way to improve LLM reasoning. Most test-time scaling (TTS) algorithms rely on autoregressive decoding, which is ill-suited to discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) due to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Jinbin Bai , Yixuan Li , Yuchen Zhu , Yi Xin , Qingyu Shi , Aosong Feng , Xiaohong Liu , Molei Tao , Jianru Xue , Xiangtai Li , Ming-Hsuan Yang

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) are gaining attention for their inherent capacity for parallel decoding, offering a compelling alternative to autoregressive LLMs. Among various decoding strategies, block-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guanxi Lu , Hao Mark Chen , Yuto Karashima , Zhican Wang , Daichi Fujiki , Hongxiang Fan

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, leveraging denoising-based generation to enable inherent parallelism. Even more and more open-sourced dLLM models emerge, yet…

We propose TraceRL, a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning framework for diffusion language models (DLMs) that incorporates preferred inference trajectory into post-training, and is applicable across different architectures. Equipped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yinjie Wang , Ling Yang , Bowen Li , Ye Tian , Ke Shen , Mengdi Wang