论文检索

Chenglin Wang, Yucheng Zhou, Shuang Chen, Tao Wang, Kai Zhang

Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the “generation frontier”, regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 \times speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.

Chenyang Shao, Sijian Ren, Fengli Xu, Yong Li

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet their autoregressive generation paradigm makes it computationally expensive to explore diverse reasoning paths. In contrast, diffusion language models (DLMs) adopt a parallel, non-autoregressive generation mechanism that enables the efficient production of diverse candidate outputs. Motivated by this complementarity, we explore a collaborative reasoning framework that combines diffusion-based generation with autoregressive evaluation. Specifically, we leverage DLMs to efficiently generate diverse intermediate reasoning thoughts, and employ LLMs as evaluators to assess and select candidates based on their plausibility and correctness. By decoupling proposal generation from evaluation, our framework exploits the strengths of both models: efficient exploration from diffusion models and causally grounded assessment from autoregressive models, which naturally aligns with the divergent-convergent thinking framework in cognitive psychology. Experiments across various mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our framework improves inference efficiency while maintaining competitive or superior reasoning accuracy, laying the groundwork for building efficient reasoning architectures. Our code is open-source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Diffuse-Thinking-EC60.

Boyan Han, Yiwei Wang, Yi Song, Yujun Cai, Chi Zhang

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer bidirectional attention and parallel generation, enabling them to exploit global context and naturally support format-constrained tasks like parseable JSON or reasoning templates. While straightforward fixed anchors can enforce such constraints, they often impose rigid spans, leading to truncated reasoning or redundant content. To overcome this, we propose Dynamic Infilling Anchors (DIA), a training-free method that dynamically estimates end-anchor positions to adjust generation length before iterative infilling. This flexible mechanism ensures structural correctness and semantic coherence, avoiding the inefficiencies of fixed-span methods. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DIA substantially improves format compliance and answer accuracy, achieving significant zero-shot gains on GSM8K and MATH. These results establish DIA as a robust pathway toward reliable, structure-aware generation.

Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin 等

While Hybrid Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the standard paradigm for training LLM agents, effective mechanisms for data allocation between these stages remain largely underexplored. Current data arbitration strategies often rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. Since SFT targets pattern consolidation through imitation while RL drives structural adaptation via exploration, misaligning data with these functional roles causes severe optimization interference. We propose PRISM, a dynamics-aware framework grounded in Schema Theory that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model’s existing knowledge. By analyzing the spatial geometric structure of gradients, PRISM identifies data triggering high spatial concentration as high-conflict signals that require RL for structural restructuring. In contrast, data yielding diffuse updates is routed to SFT for efficient consolidation. Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld demonstrate that PRISM achieves a Pareto improvement, outperforming state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 \times. Our findings suggest that disentangling data based on internal optimization regimes is crucial for scalable and robust agent alignment.

Aditya Hemant Shahane, Anuj Kumar Sirohi, Devansh Arora, Nitin Kumar, Prathosh AP, Sandeep Kumar

Bridging molecular structures and natural language is essential for controllable design. Autoregressive models struggle with long-range dependencies, while standard diffusion processes apply uniform corruption across positions, which can distort structurally informative tokens. We present BiMol-Diff, a unified diffusion framework for the paired tasks of text-conditioned molecule generation and molecule captioning. Our key component is a token-aware noise schedule that assigns position-dependent corruption based on token recovery difficulty, preserving harder-to-recover substructures during the forward process. On ChEBI-20 and M3-20M, BiMol-Diff improves molecule reconstruction with a 15.4% relative gain in Exact Match and achieves strong captioning results, attaining best BLEU and BERTScore among compared baselines. These results indicate token-aware noising improves fidelity in molecular structure-language modeling

Xuemiao Zhang, Can Ren, Chengying Tu, Rongxiang Weng, Hongfei Yan, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) struggles with the scarcity of high-quality, diverse training data. To address this limitation, we propose LinkSyn, a KP-graph-based synthesis framework that for the first time enables flexible control over discipline and difficulty distributions while balancing KP coverage and popularity. LinkSyn extracts KPs from question-answering (QA) seed data and constructs a KP graph to synthesize diverse QA data from multiple seeds strongly linked by KPs and sampled from graph walks. Specifically, LinkSyn incorporates (1) a knowledge value function to guide the adjustment of path sampling probability and balance KP coverage and popularity during graph walks; (2) diffusion-based synthesis via a strong reasoning model by leveraging multiple seeds with dense logical associations along each path; and (3) high-difficulty QA enhancement within given disciplines by flexible difficulty adjustments. By executing LinkSyn, we synthesize LinkQA, a diverse multi-disciplinary QA dataset with 50B tokens. Extensive experiments on Llama-3 8B demonstrate that continual pre-training with LinkQA yields an average improvement of 11.51% on MMLU and CMMLU, establishing new SOTA results. LinkQA consistently enhances performance across model size and initial FLOPs scales.

Ren Lijing, Denghui Zhang

The rising sophistication of digital surveillance poses hurdles for concealing sensitive data within innocuous communication channels. Conventional image steganography relies on detectable pixel-level perturbations. In this paper, we introduce a novel steganography framework that fundamentally reorients the steganographic containers from the visual domain to the linguistic domain. To seamlessly bridge the gap from raw pixels to discriminative logits, we leverage the reversible latent space of discrete diffusion models to compress high-resolution secret images into lightweight binary payloads. The semantic stability of textual data ensures the integrity of the hidden payload across diverse platforms. Extensive evaluations confirm that this cross-modal approach establishes a superior equilibrium between embedding capacity and statistical undetectability in comparison to existing paradigms.

Hyeongsoo Lim, Jinyoung Kim, Eun Seo Seo, Min Ho Jang, Ji Won Yoon

Diffusion language models (DLMs) alleviate the inherent latency bottleneck of autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs), but their degraded generation quality limits practical applicability. Although knowledge distillation (KD) can be a promising direction for improving performance, we empirically find that naively applying conventional KD yields only marginal gains, or even degrades generation quality. Based on these observations, we propose a novel self-distillation framework for DLMs, namely SelFusion. To enable effective KD without an external teacher model, SelFusion performs two forward passes with different masking levels, defining the hard mode with a larger masking probability and the easy mode with a smaller masking probability. However, the easy mode is not always more accurate than the hard mode and can be overconfident on incorrect tokens. Thus, we introduce bidirectional KD between the two modes, which can dynamically determine the distillation direction based on token-level correctness. Experimental results on instruction-following tasks show that the proposed self-distillation substantially outperforms other KD methods with external LLM and DLM teachers. In many configurations, the student trained with SelFusion even surpasses the performance of the LLM teacher, providing a practical path toward improving DLM generation quality. Source code can be found at https://github.com/scai-research/SelFusion_official

Fangming Feng, Dongjie Fu, Zequn Xie, Yu Zhang, Yangyang Wu, Zhou Zhao, Tao Jin

While diffusion and flow-matching models have advanced TTS, generating high-arousal emotions remains a persistent challenge due to the trade-off between stability and expressiveness. Existing systems often suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels under stable settings. In this work, we identify that standard Gaussian initialization inevitably introduces a neutral prosody bias, while uniform Classifier-Free Guidance often distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. To address this, we propose an inference framework that rectifies the emotional trajectory. An Emotion-Rectified Noise Prior injects a semantic gradient at initialization to align sampling with the target emotional manifold, and Likelihood-Inverse Guidance adaptively schedules guidance via a conditional/unconditional likelihood ratio, strengthening guidance only when the trajectory drifts toward a neutral fallback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resolves the stability bottleneck in high-intensity scenarios, achieving superior linguistic accuracy and emotional fidelity without model retraining. Audio samples are available at https://showtts.github.io/emotionTTS/.

Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang, Minghua He, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu 等

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 sparsity, arising from coarse or unverifiable signals that impede accurate advantage calculation; and (2) their probability estimates do not account for the gap to the unbiased expectation over all decoding orders, which are intractable to compute. To mitigate these issues, we propose d-TreeRPO, a reliable RL framework for dLLMs that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards to provide fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical proof demonstrating that increasing prediction confidence effectively minimizes the gap between unbiased expected prediction probabilities and its single-step forward pass estimate. Guided by this analysis, we introduce a time-scheduled self-distillation loss during training that enhances prediction confidence in later training stages, thereby enabling more accurate probability estimation and better performance. Experiments demonstrate that d-TreeRPO outperforms existing baselines and achieves significant improvements across multiple reasoning benchmarks. Specifically, it achieves +86.2% on Sudoku, +51.6% on Countdown, +4.5% on GSM8K, and +5.3% on Math500 compared to the base model.

Xiangyu Ma, Teng Xiao, Zuchao Li, Lefei Zhang

Diffusion models promise efficient parallel text generation but rely on bidirectional attention, creating a structural mismatch with pre-trained Autoregressive (AR) models. This incompatibility precludes reusing robust AR priors, necessitating prohibitive pre-training from scratch. To bridge this gap, we propose FLUID, a framework that efficiently adapts AR backbones to the diffusion paradigm. By enforcing Strictly Causal Alignment, FLUID enables seamless initialization from standard GPT-style checkpoints, circumventing the need for massive pre-training. Furthermore, we introduce Elastic Horizons, an entropy-driven mechanism that dynamically modulates denoising strides based on local information density rather than fixed schedules. Experiments demonstrate that FLUID achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing training costs by orders of magnitude, effectively reconciling established AR foundations with efficient parallel generation. Our code is available at https://huggingface.co/MYTH-Lab/FLUID.

Jiachen Qian

The evolution from static ranking models to Agentic Recommender Systems (Agentic RecSys) empowers AI agents to maintain long-term user profiles and autonomously plan service tasks. While this paradigm shift enhances personalization, it introduces a vulnerability: reliance on Long-term Memory (LTM). In this paper, we uncover a threat termed “Visual Inception.” Unlike traditional adversarial attacks that seek immediate misclassification, Visual Inception injects triggers into user-uploaded images (e.g., lifestyle photos) that act as “sleeper agents” within the system’s memory. When retrieved during future planning, these poisoned memories hijack the agent’s reasoning chain, steering it toward adversary-defined goals (e.g., promoting high-margin products) without prompt injection. To mitigate this, we propose CognitiveGuard, a dual-process defense framework inspired by human cognition. It consists of a System 1 Perceptual Sanitizer (diffusion-based purification) to cleanse sensory inputs and a System 2 Reasoning Verifier (counterfactual consistency checks) to detect anomalies in memory-driven planning. Extensive experiments on a mock e-commerce agent environment demonstrate that Visual Inception achieves about 85% Goal-Hit Rate (GHR), while CognitiveGuard reduces this risk to around 10% with configurable latency trade-offs (about 1.5s in lite mode to about 6.5s for full sequential verification), without quality degradation under our setup.Latency reporting uses separate accounting: query-time overhead excludes one-time upload-time preprocessing.

Shun Zou, Yong Wang, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Chongyang Tao, Feng Zhao, Xiangxiang Chu

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently become a promising alternative to autoregressive large language models (ARMs). Semi-autoregressive (Semi-AR) decoding is widely employed in base dLLMs and advanced decoding strategies due to its superior performance. However, our observations reveal that Semi-AR decoding suffers from inherent block constraints, which cause the decoding of many cross-block stable tokens to be unnecessarily delayed. To address this challenge, we systematically investigate the identification of stable tokens and present three key findings: (1) naive lookahead decoding is unreliable, (2) token stability closely correlates with convergence trend, and (3) historical information is isolated. Building on these insights, we propose Anchor-based History-stable Decoding (AHD), a training-free, plug-and-play dynamic decoding strategy. Specifically, AHD monitors the stability trend of tokens in real time through dynamic anchors. Once a token reaches stability, it initiates early cross-block decoding to enhance efficiency and performance. Extensive experiments across language, vision-language, and audio-language domains demonstrate that AHD simultaneously improves both performance and inference efficiency. Notably, AHD effectively reverses the performance degradation typically observed in existing advanced decoding acceleration strategies. For instance, on the BBH benchmark, our approach reduces decoding steps by 80% while improving performance by 3.67%.

Fan Li, Yu Gu, Zhigang Wang, Fangling Leng, Zhenghao Liu, Ge Yu

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a powerful non-autoregressive alternative to GPT-style sequential generation, but suffer from substantial computational overhead due to their iterative parallel denoising. Existing acceleration works cannot accurately detect semantically stabilized tokens and then skip computation, leading to sub-optimal speedup in practice. This paper presents the first systematic study of convergence dynamics in DLMs. Innovative observations include the misalignment between traditionally used scalar detection criterion and the semantic convergence, and the post-peak confidence score, that wastes denoising computation and degrades inference quality. To address these limitations, we propose Ada-DLM, a semantic-aware adaptive denoising framework that encodes the trajectory of scalar confidence scores into an evolution-aware feature vector and then clusters vectors proactively and adaptively identify semantically converged tokens. Furthermore, we incorporate system-level optimizations to maximize runtime efficiency. Experiments show that Ada-DLM consistently outperforms the SOTA competitor, achieving up to 2x speedup and 19% quality improvement. That offers a practical path toward efficient high-quality DLM deployment.

Yan Zimo, Zheng Xie, Runfan Duan, Chang Liu, Wumei Du

Molecular graph learning benefits from positional signals that capture both local neighborhoods and global topology. Two widely used families are spectral encodings derived from Laplacian or diffusion operators and anchor-based distance encodings built from shortest-path information, but the relationship between them is still not well understood. In this paper, we study when anchor-based distance encodings can approximate diffusion geometry. Under a random r-regular graph model, we derive an explicit trilateration map that reconstructs truncated diffusion coordinates from transformed anchor distances and anchor spectral positions, together with pointwise and Frobenius-gap guarantees. On DrugBank with a shared GNP-based DDI backbone, anchor-distance Nyström accurately recovers diffusion geometry, and both DE and LapPE outperform models without positional encodings, with LapPE showing slightly more consistent performance.

Yuejiao Wang, Zihao Ji, Pengfei Cai, Xu Li, Haorui Zheng, Zewen Song, Zhongliang Liu, Chen Zhang, Pengfei Wan

Recent advances in neural song generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from lyrics and global textual prompts. However, most systems fail to model temporally varying attributes of songs, severely limiting fine-grained control over musical structure and dynamics. To address this, we propose Segtune, a Diffusion Transformer-based framework enabling structured and fine-grained controllability by allowing users or large language models (LLMs) to specify local musical descriptions aligned to song segments. These segment prompts are temporally broadcast to corresponding time windows, while global prompts ensure stylistic coherence. To support precise lyric-to-music alignment, we introduce an LLM-based duration predictor that autoregressively generates sentence-level timestamps in LyRiCs format. We further construct a large-scale data pipeline for high-quality song collection with aligned lyrics and prompts, and propose new metrics to evaluate segment alignment and vocal consistency. Experiments demonstrate that Segtune outperforms existing baselines in both musicality and controllability. Visit our demo page for codes and more generated songs.

Lingkun Long, Yushi Huang, Shihao Bai, Ruihao Gong, Jun Zhang, Ao Zhou, Jianlei Yang

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) deliver strong long-context processing capability in a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. However, the considerable computational cost of bidirectional full attention limits the inference efficiency. Although sparse attention is promising, existing methods remain ineffective. This stems from the need to estimate attention importance for tokens yet to be decoded, while the unmasked token positions are unknown during diffusion. In this paper, we present **Focus-dLLM**, a novel training-free attention sparsification framework tailored for accurate and efficient long-context dLLM inference. Based on the finding that token confidence strongly correlates across adjacent steps, we first design a *past confidence-guided indicator* to predict unmasked regions. Built upon this, we propose a *sink-aware pruning strategy* to accurately estimate and remove redundant attention computation, while preserving highly influential attention sinks. To further reduce overhead, this strategy reuses identified sink locations across layers, leveraging the observed cross-layer consistency. Experimental results show that our method offers more than 29\times lossless speedup under 32K context length.

Haomin Zuo, Yidi Li, Luoxiao Yang, Xiaofeng Zhang

While diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models (dMLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable strides in multimodal generation, the development of interpretability mechanisms has lagged behind their architectural evolution. Unlike traditional autoregressive models that produce sequential activations, diffusion-based architectures generate tokens via parallel denoising, resulting in smooth, distributed activation patterns across the entire sequence. Consequently, existing Class Activation Mapping (CAM) methods, which are tailored for local, sequential dependencies, are ill-suited for interpreting these non-autoregressive behaviors. To bridge this gap, we propose Diffusion-CAM, the first interpretability method specifically tailored for dMLLMs. We derive raw activation maps by differentiably probing intermediate representations in the transformer backbone, accordingly capturing both latent features and their class-specific gradients. To address the inherent stochasticity of these raw signals, we incorporate four key modules to resolve spatial ambiguity and mitigate intra-image confounders and redundant token correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Diffusion-CAM significantly outperforms SoTA methods in both localization accuracy and visual fidelity, establishing a new standard for understanding the parallel generation process of diffusion multimodal systems.

Fan Xu, Huixuan Zhang, Xiaojun Wan

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) generate text via iterative masked-token denoising, supporting parallel prediction and bidirectional context modeling. Despite these advantages, decoding remains challenging: many tokens appear predictable early, yet single-step predictions are often unstable, exhibiting temporal oscillations or overconfidence, making it difficult to determine which tokens can be safely committed. To address these challenges, we propose DecoCal, a Decoding framework that explicitly performs Calibration of token-level confidence across diffusion steps and leverages the calibrated results to guide decoding decisions. Specifically, DecoCal aggregates historical predictions to maintain calibrated confidence, triggering unmasking only when a token is sufficiently stable, while a remasking mechanism allows revision of premature commitments. This calibration-based design enables early decoding of reliably converged tokens while deferring or correcting unstable ones, balancing reliability and speed. Experiments on multiple DLLMs and benchmarks show that DecoCal improves generation accuracy compared to existing strategies. Our results highlight the importance of temporal calibration in unlocking the full potential of diffusion-based language generation.

Fengqi Zhu, Rongzhen Wang, Shen Nie, Xiaolu Zhang, Chunwei Wu, Jun Zhou, Yankai Lin, Ji-Rong Wen, Chongxuan Li

Masked diffusion language models present a promising paradigm for language modeling, yet the systematic theoretical analysis and comprehensive empirical validation of their alignment on general tasks remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we identify the primary challenge for this problem: the high variance in Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO)-based likelihood estimates required for preference optimization. To address this issue, we propose *Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization* (VRPO), a framework that formally analyzes the bias and variance of the preference optimization loss and gradient based on Direct Preference Optimization, showing both are governed by a score-estimator variance. Building on this foundation, we introduce multiple unbiased variance reduction strategies, including optimal budget allocation and antithetic sampling, to improve alignment performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VRPO by applying it to LLaDA, a large diffusion language model. The resulting model, LLaDA 1.5, consistently outperforms its SFT-only predecessor consistently across various general benchmarks, such as mathematics (GSM8K +4.7), coding (HumanEval +3.0, MBPP +1.8), and alignment (IFEval +4.0, Arena-Hard +4.3). Furthermore, LLaDA 1.5 demonstrates a highly competitive mathematical performance compared to other strong language MDMs and ARMs. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/GSAI-ML/LLaDA-1.5.