Speculative Refinement: A Hybrid Autoregressive Diffusion Decoding Strategy and Its Behavior Across Benchmarks

arXiv:2606.27474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How should we evaluate generation systems that combine autoregressive (AR) and diffusion decoding? We study this question through Speculative Refinement (SpecRef), a training-free hybrid method that warm-starts a masked diffusion language model from an AR draft using entropy-guided selective masking. Evaluating SpecRef across six benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, GSM8K, BBH, ARC-Challenge, HellaSwag) with three distinct evaluation protocols (execution-based pass@1, exact-match, log-likelihood scoring), we surface several findings relevant beyond our

Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.

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