This work presents Consistency Forcing (CForce) for dLLMs, a distillation method to force the mask predictions of early stages to align with those of later stages, thereby improving training-inference alignment.
Abstract
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) accelerate language generation by predicting multiple masks in a single forward pass. However, existing dLLMs can suffer from unreliable predictions in early denoising stages under aggressive parallelism strategies, leading to errors that can propagate to later stages. To tackle this issue, we present Consistency Forcing (CForce) for dLLMs, a distillation method to force the mask predictions of early stages to align with those of later stages. CForce trains the model on pre-collected self-rollout trajectories, thereby improving training-inference alignment. We introduce Confidence Adaptive KL Divergence as a distillation objective to conjoin the merits of forward and reverse KL. We further provide a theoretical analysis for the consistency objective to explain why CForce can approximately minimize the prediction error of early stages. Critically, the same formulation applies to both mask-to-token decoding and edit-capable decoding; in the edit-capable case, later token-to-token refinements provide additional supervision for earlier masked-state predictions. Experiments on non-edit and edit-capable LLaDA models show improved speed-quality trade-offs, especially under high-parallelism decoding budgets. Code is available at: https://github.com/inclusionAI/dFactory.
DARD is proposed, a training-free framework that separates tokens into masked, candidate, and unmasked states and adaptively regulates their influence on subsequent decoding, and consistently improves the speed-quality Pareto frontier over recent revocable decoding methods.
Woo-Soon Park, Insu Lee, Minyoung Noh et al.· 1 citation
Pruning is essential for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs); however, it causes severe performance degradation due to the structural distortion induced by sparsity. Existing recovery strategies, such as LoRA, predominantly employ global fine-tuning, often overlooking the mechanistic root of this degradation: the layer-wise accumulation and amplification of local errors. To address this limitation, we propose LaCo ( La yer-wise Co mpensation), a framework that reori-ents the recovery paradigm from global adaptation to hierarchical representation alignment. By sequentially optimizing each layer to re-construct the model’s hidden states, LaCo effectively intercepts the error propagation chain at its source. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaCo surpasses parameter-efficient baselines in both perplexity reduction and zero-shot reasoning. Notably, it reduces recovery-time memory usage to approximately 1 / 7 of the baseline and requires only 2,048 unlabeled samples to match a LoRA model trained on 50k examples—achieving a ∼ 25 × improvement in data efficiency.
Yingen Liu, Fan Wu, Xuyan Pan et al.· Annual Meeting of the Associ...· 0 citations
This work proposes CAI-DLLM, a training-free inference method that uses first-step confidence to guide denoising and reduce inference time, and evaluates CAI-DLLM on LLaDA-8B-Instruct and Dream-7B-Instruct across math, code, reasoning, commonsense, and long-context tasks.
Farhana Amin, Sabiha Afroz, D. Nikolopoulos· 0 citations
This work finds that likelihood-trained TPMs can result in failed generations due to overly large corrections to the LM’s logits, and trains TPMs with LM-aligned objectives that better align with the LM token-probability space.
Hanzhang Liu, William Zhao, Zilei Shao et al.· 0 citations
Spatio-Temporal Token Veto is proposed, which leverages the ability to observe all token positions at each diffusion step and vetoes temporally unstable tokens via second-order Taylor prediction of confidence dynamics and filters weakly grounded tokens using image-attention mass, swapping them with safer candidates.
Keuntae Kim, Beomseok Lee, Hyunwoo Kim et al.· 0 citations
AdaFlash framework is proposed, comprising two components: an on-policy distillation algorithm with reverse-KL divergence tailored for diffusion drafters, bringing stable convergence and effectively reducing domain-level variance and an adaptive length head that dynamically adjusts the candidate sequence length on the fly, substantially lowering the verification cost of the target model and handling token-level variance.
Yuanpan Qian, Hao Wu, Chen Chen et al.· 0 citations