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Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) are rapidly emerging alongside autoregressive models as a powerful paradigm for complex reasoning, with reinforcement learning increasingly used for downstream alignment. Existing trajectory-based RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Ranfei Chen , Ming Chen , Kaifei Wang

Autoregressive (AR) language models enforce a fixed left-to-right generation order, creating a fundamental limitation when the required output structure conflicts with natural reasoning (e.g., producing answers before explanations due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Longxuan Yu , Yu Fu , Shaorong Zhang , Hui Liu , Mukund Varma T , Greg Ver Steeg , Yue Dong

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities that benefits from online reinforcement learning (RL). These capabilities have primarily been demonstrated within the left-to-right autoregressive (AR)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Siyan Zhao , Devaansh Gupta , Qinqing Zheng , Aditya Grover

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Jaemoo Choi , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements, with the test-time scaling law consistently enhancing the reasoning capabilities. Through systematic evaluation and exploration of a diverse spectrum of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Chenyang Shao , Sijian Ren , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, order-agnostic generation with iterative refinement, offering a flexible alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, adapting reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Kevin Rojas , Jiahe Lin , Kashif Rasul , Anderson Schneider , Yuriy Nevmyvaka , Molei Tao , Wei Deng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Haoqiang Kang , Yizhe Zhang , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Lianhui Qin

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Sijia Chen , Baochun Li

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Dawen Liang , Wenpin Tang , David Yao , Nathan Kallus

Recent generations of language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Parshin Shojaee , Iman Mirzadeh , Keivan Alizadeh , Maxwell Horton , Samy Bengio , Mehrdad Farajtabar

Recent diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have demonstrated both effectiveness and efficiency in reasoning via a block-based semi-autoregressive generation paradigm. Despite their progress, the fixed-size block generations remain a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yan Jiang , Ruihong Qiu , Zi Huang

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs, have recently shown strong results in pretraining. However, due to their lack of tractable sequence-level likelihoods, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Anthony Zhan

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) represent a new paradigm beyond autoregressive modeling, offering competitive performance while naturally enabling a flexible decoding process. Specifically, dLLMs can generate tokens at arbitrary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Sicheng Feng , Zigeng Chen , Xinyin Ma , Gongfan Fang , Xinchao Wang

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer fast, parallel token generation, but their standalone use is plagued by an inherent efficiency-quality tradeoff. We show that, if carefully applied, the attributes of dLLMs can actually be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Rui Pan , Zhuofu Chen , Hongyi Liu , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Ravi Netravali

Recent studies empirically reveal that large reasoning models (LRMs) can automatically allocate more reasoning strengths (i.e., the number of reasoning tokens) for harder problems, exhibiting difficulty-awareness for better task…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Leheng Sheng , An Zhang , Zijian Wu , Weixiang Zhao , Changshuo Shen , Yi Zhang , Xiang Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from order bias, where their performance is affected by the arrangement order of input elements. This unfairness limits the model's applications in scenarios such as in-context learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xu Chu , Guanyu Wang , Zhijie Tan , Xinrong Chen , Ziyu Li , Tong Mo , Weiping Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly transformed the landscape of artificial intelligence, enabling natural language interfaces and dynamic orchestration of software components. However, their reliance on probabilistic inference limits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Claudionor Coelho , Yanen Li , Philip Tee

Reinforcement learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of diffusion large language models (dLLMs). However, existing dLLM policy optimization methods suffer from two critical reliability bottlenecks: (1) reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Leyi Pan , Shuchang Tao , Yunpeng Zhai , Zheyu Fu , Liancheng Fang , Minghua He , Lingzhe Zhang , Zhaoyang Liu , Bolin Ding , Aiwei Liu , Lijie Wen

State-of-the-art large language model (LLM) pipelines rely on bootstrapped reasoning loops: sampling diverse chains of thought and reinforcing the highest-scoring ones, mainly optimizing correctness. We analyze how this design choice is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Max Ruiz Luyten , Mihaela van der Schaar
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