Beyond Hard Masks: Progressive Token Evolution for Diffusion Language Models
Linhao Zhong Zhejiang University, Linyu Wu National University of Singapore, Bozhen Fang, Tianjian Feng, Chenchen Jing, Wen Wang Zhejiang University, Jiaheng Zhang National University of Singapore, Hao Chen Zhejiang University 等 9 位作者
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative for language modeling by enabling parallel decoding through iterative refinement. However, most DLMs rely on hard binary masking and discrete token assignments, which hinder the revision of early decisions and underutilize intermediate probabilistic representations. In this paper, we propose EvoToken-DLM, a novel diffusion-based language modeling approach that replaces hard binary masks with evolving soft token distributions. EvoToken-DLM enables a progressive transition from masked states to discrete outputs, supporting revisable decoding. To effectively support this evolution, we introduce continuous trajectory supervision, which aligns training objectives with iterative probabilistic updates. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that EvoToken-DLM consistently achieves superior performance, outperforming strong diffusion-based and masked DLM baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/EvoTokenDLM.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表