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Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zachary Horvitz , Raghav Singhal , Hao Zou , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Zhou Yu , Rajesh Ranganath , Kathleen McKeown

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit outstanding performance on vision-language tasks but struggle with hallucination problems. Through in-depth analysis of LVLM activation patterns, we reveal two key findings: 1) truthfulness and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianghao Yin , Qin Chen , Kedi Chen , Jie Zhou , Xingjiao Wu , Liang He

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) enable parallel token decoding, providing a promising alternative to the sequential nature of autoregressive generation. However, their iterative denoising process remains computationally expensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Younjoo Lee , Junghoo Lee , Seungkyun Dan , Jaiyoung Park , Jung Ho Ahn

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising approach for language modeling, yet they face a performance gap compared to autoregressive models (ARMs) and require more training iterations. In this work, we present the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Mahdi Karami , Ali Ghodsi

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm. By generating tokens in parallel through an iterative denoising process, DLMs possess inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Tianyi Li , Mingda Chen , Bowei Guo , Zhiqiang Shen

While Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) relying on token masking and unmasking have shown promise in language modeling, their computational efficiency and generation flexibility remain constrained by the masking paradigm. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Fangyu Ding , Ding Ding , Sijin Chen , Kaibo Wang , Peng Xu , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Kai Han , Youliang Yan , Binhang Yuan , Jiacheng Sun

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Fengrui Zuo , Zhiwei Ke , Yiming Liu , Wenqi Lou , Chao Wang , Xuehai Zhou

Unified architectures in multimodal large language models (MLLM) have shown promise in handling diverse tasks within a single framework. In the text-to-speech (TTS) task, current MLLM-based approaches rely on discrete token representations,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-27 Xinlu He , Swayambhu Nath Ray , Harish Mallidi , Jia-Hong Huang , Ashwin Bellur , Chander Chandak , M. Maruf , Venkatesh Ravichandran

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shuai Wang , Yu Yin , Shengyao Zhuang , Bevan Koopman , Guido Zuccon

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently demonstrated capabilities that complement standard autoregressive (AR) models, particularly in non-sequential generation and bidirectional editing. Although recent work has shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Fred Zhangzhi Peng , Alexis Fox , Anru R. Zhang , Alexander Tong

Probing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) using prompts has indirectly implied that language models (LMs) can be treated as knowledge bases. To this end, this phenomena has been effective especially when these LMs are fine-tuned towards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-08 M. Abaho , D. Bollegala , P. Williamson , S. Dodd

Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Maximo Eduardo Rulli , Simone Petruzzi , Edoardo Michielon , Fabrizio Silvestri , Simone Scardapane , Alessio Devoto

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit reasoning biases, often conflating content plausibility with formal logical validity. This can lead to wrong inferences in critical domains, where plausible arguments are incorrectly deemed logically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Marco Valentino , Geonhee Kim , Dhairya Dalal , Zhixue Zhao , André Freitas

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shaona Ghosh , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Yftah Ziser , Christopher Parisien

Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Uzay Macar , Li Yang , Atticus Wang , Peter Wallich , Emmanuel Ameisen , Jack Lindsey

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a new paradigm in language modeling, offering flexible generation dynamics and enabling efficient parallel decoding. However, existing decoding strategies for pre-trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xueyu Zhou , Yangrong Hu , Jian Huang

Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Houxing Ren , Mingjie Zhan , Zimu Lu , Ke Wang , Yunqiao Yang , Haotian Hou , Junting Pan , Hongsheng Li

Code LLMs often default to particular programming languages and libraries under neutral prompts. We investigate whether these preferences are encoded as approximately linear directions in activation space that can be manipulated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Md Mahbubur Rahman , Arjun Guha , Harshitha Menon

We present a controlled empirical comparison between autoregressive (AR) and masked diffusion (MDLM) language models. Both models are trained on identical data (50M tokens from TinyStories), identical compute budget (20,000 steps, batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caio Vicentino