Don't Settle Too Early: Self-Reflective Remasking for Diffusion Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Zemin, Wang, Yuhang, Chen, Zhiyang, Qi, Guo-Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Zemin
Wang, Yuhang
Chen, Zhiyang
Qi, Guo-Jun
author_facet Huang, Zemin
Wang, Yuhang
Chen, Zhiyang
Qi, Guo-Jun
contents Mask-based Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) struggle to revise incorrect tokens: once a token is generated, it typically remains fixed. The key challenge is to identify potential errors in the inputs. In this paper, we propose \emph{\underline{Rem}asking-\underline{e}nabled \underline{Di}ffusion Language Model (RemeDi}, a mask-based DLM that introduces \emph{remasking} as another fundamental mechanism, enabling more flexible text refinement in diffusion-based text generation. To achieve this, RemeDi jointly predicts token distributions and per-token confidence scores at each step. The confidence scores determine which tokens to be unmasked after the current step, allowing the model to identify tokens with low quality and remask them. These remasked tokens can be resampled with richer context in subsequent steps. We design a remask-aware pipeline to train this ability, including supervised fine-tuning which teaches the model to detect and remask incorrect tokens in addition to predict mask tokens, and reinforcement learning which optimizes full generation trajectories toward higher rewards. Experiments show that RemeDi achieves the state-of-the-art results among open-source DLMs on multiple datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23653
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Don't Settle Too Early: Self-Reflective Remasking for Diffusion Language Models
Huang, Zemin
Wang, Yuhang
Chen, Zhiyang
Qi, Guo-Jun
Computation and Language
Mask-based Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) struggle to revise incorrect tokens: once a token is generated, it typically remains fixed. The key challenge is to identify potential errors in the inputs. In this paper, we propose \emph{\underline{Rem}asking-\underline{e}nabled \underline{Di}ffusion Language Model (RemeDi}, a mask-based DLM that introduces \emph{remasking} as another fundamental mechanism, enabling more flexible text refinement in diffusion-based text generation. To achieve this, RemeDi jointly predicts token distributions and per-token confidence scores at each step. The confidence scores determine which tokens to be unmasked after the current step, allowing the model to identify tokens with low quality and remask them. These remasked tokens can be resampled with richer context in subsequent steps. We design a remask-aware pipeline to train this ability, including supervised fine-tuning which teaches the model to detect and remask incorrect tokens in addition to predict mask tokens, and reinforcement learning which optimizes full generation trajectories toward higher rewards. Experiments show that RemeDi achieves the state-of-the-art results among open-source DLMs on multiple datasets.
title Don't Settle Too Early: Self-Reflective Remasking for Diffusion Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23653