The Flexibility Trap: Rethinking the Value of Arbitrary Order in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2601.15165v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution space that strictly supersets the fixed autoregressive trajectory, theoretically unlocking superior reasoning potential. However, in this paper, we find that for general reasoning tasks (e.g., mathematics and coding), arbitrary order generation may in fact limit the reasoning potential of dLLMs. We observe that dLLMs tend to exploit this orde

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

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