CORE: Context-Robust Remasking for Diffusion Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhai, Kevin, Mollah, Sabbir, Wang, Zhenyi, Shah, Mubarak
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Zhai, Kevin
Mollah, Sabbir
Wang, Zhenyi
Shah, Mubarak
author_facet Zhai, Kevin
Mollah, Sabbir
Wang, Zhenyi
Shah, Mubarak
contents Standard decoding in Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) is hindered by context rigidity: tokens are retained based on transient high confidence, often ignoring that early predictions lack full context. This creates cascade effects where initial inconsistencies misguide the remaining generation. Existing revision strategies attempt to mitigate this by relying on static confidence scores, but these signals are inherently myopic; inconsistent tokens can appear confident to the model itself. We propose Context-Robust Remasking (CORE), a training-free framework for inference-time revision. Rather than trusting static token probabilities, CORE identifies context-brittle tokens by probing their sensitivity to targeted masked-context perturbations. We formalize revision as a robust optimization objective over context shifts and efficiently approximate this objective to prioritize unstable tokens for revision. On LLaDA-8B-Base, CORE delivers consistent improvements across reasoning and code benchmarks, outperforming compute-matched baselines and improving MBPP by up to 9.2 percentage points.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04096
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CORE: Context-Robust Remasking for Diffusion Language Models
Zhai, Kevin
Mollah, Sabbir
Wang, Zhenyi
Shah, Mubarak
Machine Learning
Standard decoding in Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) is hindered by context rigidity: tokens are retained based on transient high confidence, often ignoring that early predictions lack full context. This creates cascade effects where initial inconsistencies misguide the remaining generation. Existing revision strategies attempt to mitigate this by relying on static confidence scores, but these signals are inherently myopic; inconsistent tokens can appear confident to the model itself. We propose Context-Robust Remasking (CORE), a training-free framework for inference-time revision. Rather than trusting static token probabilities, CORE identifies context-brittle tokens by probing their sensitivity to targeted masked-context perturbations. We formalize revision as a robust optimization objective over context shifts and efficiently approximate this objective to prioritize unstable tokens for revision. On LLaDA-8B-Base, CORE delivers consistent improvements across reasoning and code benchmarks, outperforming compute-matched baselines and improving MBPP by up to 9.2 percentage points.
title CORE: Context-Robust Remasking for Diffusion Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04096