Edit-Based Refinement for Parallel Masked Diffusion Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ren, Houxing, Zhan, Mingjie, Lu, Zimu, Wang, Ke, Yang, Yunqiao, Hou, Haotian, Pan, Junting, Li, Hongsheng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Ren, Houxing
Zhan, Mingjie
Lu, Zimu
Wang, Ke
Yang, Yunqiao
Hou, Haotian
Pan, Junting
Li, Hongsheng
author_facet Ren, Houxing
Zhan, Mingjie
Lu, Zimu
Wang, Ke
Yang, Yunqiao
Hou, Haotian
Pan, Junting
Li, Hongsheng
contents Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a mismatch between token-level training objectives and joint sequence consistency. In this paper, we propose ME-DLM, an edit-based refinement framework that augments diffusion generation with lightweight post-editing steps. After producing an initial complete response, the model refines it through minimal edit operations, including replacement, deletion, and insertion, conditioned on the full sequence. Training supervision is derived from edit distance, providing a deterministic signal under a fixed canonicalization scheme for learning minimal corrections. This approach encourages sequence-level consistency through globally conditioned edits while preserving the efficiency benefits of parallel diffusion decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ME-DLM improves the quality and robustness of multi-token parallel generation. In particular, when built upon LLaDA, our method achieves consistent gains of 11.6 points on HumanEval and 33.6 points on GSM8K while using one-eighth of the total diffusion steps. Code is available at https://github.com/renhouxing/ME-DLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Edit-Based Refinement for Parallel Masked Diffusion Language Models
Ren, Houxing
Zhan, Mingjie
Lu, Zimu
Wang, Ke
Yang, Yunqiao
Hou, Haotian
Pan, Junting
Li, Hongsheng
Computation and Language
Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a mismatch between token-level training objectives and joint sequence consistency. In this paper, we propose ME-DLM, an edit-based refinement framework that augments diffusion generation with lightweight post-editing steps. After producing an initial complete response, the model refines it through minimal edit operations, including replacement, deletion, and insertion, conditioned on the full sequence. Training supervision is derived from edit distance, providing a deterministic signal under a fixed canonicalization scheme for learning minimal corrections. This approach encourages sequence-level consistency through globally conditioned edits while preserving the efficiency benefits of parallel diffusion decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ME-DLM improves the quality and robustness of multi-token parallel generation. In particular, when built upon LLaDA, our method achieves consistent gains of 11.6 points on HumanEval and 33.6 points on GSM8K while using one-eighth of the total diffusion steps. Code is available at https://github.com/renhouxing/ME-DLM.
title Edit-Based Refinement for Parallel Masked Diffusion Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09603