Diffusion LM papers in 2026

Not an exhaustive catalog: these are core papers recorded in the public corpus. Paper counts do not measure quality or the importance of a method.

UTC: .

Core papers matching the current filters: 3.

By month and topic
MonthPapers
January0
February0
March0
April0
May0
June0
July3
August0
September0

Topics can overlap: a paper counts once in each of its topics, but only once in the total. A topic assignment does not prove quality or reproducibility.

Latest papers · Selection methodology

2026-07-20T08:05:03+00:00 · Masked / discrete diffusion, Post-training · Source

FlowBlock: Wavefront-Parallel Decoding for Self-Correcting Diffusion Language Models

Block-wise diffusion large language models (dLLMs) decode sequentially at the block level, enabling effective KV-cache reuse across blocks but making inter-block decoding strictly serial. Prior work has attempted to unlock inter-block parallelism through post-training methods, but achieves only modest speedups and often degrades accuracy. We observe that self-correcting dLLMs offer a training-free alternative: token-to-token (T2T) editing can repair tokens drafted with a slightly stale upstream context, so a downstream block requires only an informative draft rather than a finalized predecesso

Useful for: Not assessed · Limitation: Not assessed

2026-07-18T16:25:17+00:00 · Masked / discrete diffusion, Reasoning, Post-training · Source

Trace-Based On-Policy Distillation for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive generation. However, reasoning-oriented post-training for dLLMs remains challenging. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for dLLMs requires dense but often off-policy masked states, while reinforcement learning (RL) relies on sparse rewards or value modeling. This paper proposes \textbf{trace-based on-policy distillation (TOPD)}, a teacher-supervised framework that transfers reasoning ability to a target dLLM without reward estimation. The key idea is to supervise a dLLM on its own denoising trajectory, focusing on

Useful for: Not assessed · Limitation: Not assessed

2026-07-16T16:57:34+00:00 · Masked / discrete diffusion, Reasoning, Post-training · Source

Mask-Aware Policy Gradients for Diffusion Language Models

Reinforcement learning has proven effective for improving reasoning in large language models, but extending it to Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) remains challenging due to the intractability of the log-likelihood estimation. Existing approaches approximate this log-likelihood by modeling only the token predictions, ignoring the order in which positions are unmasked during generation. We observe that MDLM generation involves two decisions at each step: what tokens to place at each masked position and which positions to remask. We formalize this as a two-stage action MDP, showing that

Useful for: Not assessed · Limitation: Not assessed

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