Related papers: No Compute Left Behind: Rethinking Reasoning and S…

Recent breakthroughs in reasoning models have markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, particularly via training on tasks with verifiable rewards. Yet, a significant gap persists in their adaptation to real…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning abilities, often attributed to few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While effective, these methods require labor-intensive prompt engineering, raising the question of…

Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, but most existing methods optimize policies over discrete token sequences. This creates a mismatch between the optimization space and the structure of…

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) as language models generate by iteratively unmasking tokens, yet their performance crucially depends on the inference time order of unmasking. Prevailing heuristics, such as confidence based sampling, are…

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) enable flexible decoding orders, yet existing samplers remain largely greedy, selecting locally certain tokens without accounting for their downstream effects. We show that this myopia can increase cumulative…

The handling of probabilities in the form of uncertainty or partial information is an essential task for LLMs in many settings and applications. A common approach to evaluate an LLM's probabilistic reasoning capabilities is to assess its…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models for faster inference via parallel token generation. We provide a rigorous foundation for this advantage by formalizing a model of parallel…

Understanding how the human brain progresses from processing simple linguistic inputs to performing high-level reasoning is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. While modern large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to model…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pivotal in advancing natural language processing but often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to inefficient attention distributions. In this paper, we explore the effect of increased computed tokens…

Pre-trained language models based on masked language modeling (MLM) excel in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While fine-tuned MLM-based encoders consistently outperform causal language modeling decoders of comparable size,…

Recent methods have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning tasks better when they are encouraged to solve subtasks of the main task first. In this paper we devise a similar strategy that breaks down reasoning…

Language models (LMs) can perform complex reasoning either end-to-end, with hidden latent state, or compositionally, with transparent intermediate state. Composition offers benefits for interpretability and safety, but may need workflow…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, but inference requires full-sequence attention at every iteration, resulting in substantial redundant computation on masked tokens. Block-wise diffusion can reduce…

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through chain of thought (CoT) prompting. Recently, there has been a growing interest in transferring these reasoning abilities from LLMs to smaller…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a potential alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language generation, but generation quality depends critically on the generation order. Prior work either hard-codes an ordering (e.g., blockwise…

This paper shows how diffusion language models (DLMs) can be used as effective and efficient retrievers. Existing DLM-based retrievers (e.g., DiffEmbed) follow BERT-style encoding, representing each query or passage as a single mean-pooled…

Recent advances in masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) narrow the quality gap to autoregressive LMs, but their sampling remains expensive because generation requires many full-sequence denoising passes with a large Transformer and,…

Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated significant improvements in accuracy by employing detailed and comprehensive reasoning processes. However, generating these lengthy reasoning sequences is computationally expensive and…

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) accelerate text generation by unmasking multiple tokens in parallel. However, parallel decoding introduces a distributional mismatch: it approximates the joint conditional using a fully factorized…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models over discrete domains. MDMs generate sequences in an any-order, parallel fashion, enabling fast inference and strong performance on…