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Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation, which in turn presents new challenges for aligning them with human preferences. In this work, we aim to improve the policy optimization for dLLMs by…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), where pre-training and RL post-training share the same log-likelihood formulation. In contrast, recent RL approaches for diffusion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Shuchen Xue , Chongjian Ge , Shilong Zhang , Yichen Li , Zhi-Ming Ma

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer capabilities beyond those of autoregressive (AR) LLMs, such as parallel decoding and random-order generation. However, realizing these benefits in practice is non-trivial, as dLLMs inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yu-Yang Qian , Junda Su , Lanxiang Hu , Peiyuan Zhang , Zhijie Deng , Peng Zhao , Hao Zhang

We introduce iterative tilting, a gradient-free method for fine-tuning diffusion models toward reward-tilted distributions. The method decomposes a large reward tilt $\exp(\lambda r)$ into $N$ sequential smaller tilts, each admitting a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Jean Pachebat , Giovanni Conforti , Alain Durmus , Yazid Janati

We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Shiyu Wang , Haolin Chen , Liangwei Yang , Jielin Qiu , Rithesh Murthy , Ming Zhu , Zixiang Chen , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Shelby Heinecke , Huan Wang

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generative performance but are fundamentally bottlenecked by their slow, iterative sampling process. While diffusion distillation techniques enable high-fidelity, few-step generation, traditional…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Linqian Fan , Peiqin Sun , Tiancheng Wen , Shun Lu , Chengru Song

Improving the reasoning capabilities of diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) through reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open problem. The intractability of dLLMs likelihood function necessitates approximating the current, old,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Xiaohang Tang , Rares Dolga , Sangwoong Yoon , Ilija Bogunovic

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has drawn urgent attention to the task of machine-generated text detection (MGTD). However, existing approaches struggle in complex real-world scenarios: zero-shot detectors rely heavily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Jiachen Fu , Chun-Le Guo , Chongyi Li

Recent semi-supervised learning methods use pseudo supervision as core idea, especially self-training methods that generate pseudo labels. However, pseudo labels are unreliable. Self-training methods usually rely on single model prediction…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Zhengyang Feng , Qianyu Zhou , Qiqi Gu , Xin Tan , Guangliang Cheng , Xuequan Lu , Jianping Shi , Lizhuang Ma

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yuxiang Wang , Yu Xiang , Baojian Zhou , Qifang Zhao , Keyue Jiang , Yanghua Xiao , Xiaoxiao Xu

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yudi Zhang , Lu Wang , Meng Fang , Yali Du , Chenghua Huang , Jun Wang , Qingwei Lin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Recent masked diffusion language models (MDLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have achieved performance comparable to autoregressive large language models. Unlike autoregressive models, which generate text sequentially, MDLMs generate text by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Georu Lee , Seungwon Jeong , Hoki Kim , Jinseong Park , Woojin Lee

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are an attractive alternative to autoregressive models because they promise sublinear-time, parallel generation, yet practical gains remain elusive as high-quality samples still demand hundreds of refinement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Hasan Amin , Yuan Gao , Yaser Souri , Subhojit Som , Ming Yin , Rajiv Khanna , Xia Song

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations without human-annotated preference data is an important problem. In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the response preference by using the output probabilities of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Aiwei Liu , Haoping Bai , Zhiyun Lu , Xiang Kong , Simon Wang , Jiulong Shan , Meng Cao , Lijie Wen

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

We introduce Similarity-Distance-Magnitude (SDM) language models (LMs), which are sequence prediction models fine-tuned to maximize the proportion of generations in the well-calibrated, high-probability region partitioned by a final-layer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Allen Schmaltz

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 diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area. Here, we introduce d2, a reasoning framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Guanghan Wang , Gilad Turok , Yair Schiff , Marianne Arriola , Volodymyr Kuleshov

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Liran Ringel , Ameen Ali , Yaniv Romano

The increasing demand for long-context modeling in large language models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the quadratic complexity of the standard self-attention mechanism. The community has proposed sparse attention to mitigate this issue.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Jingze Shi , Yifan Wu , Yiran Peng , Bingheng Wu , Liangdong Wang , Guang Liu , Yuyu Luo