Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must choose not only which predictions are reliable in isolation, but also which positions should be committed together as context for later decoding steps. Existing confidence-based decoding ranks masked positions independently and commits the top-K positions, largely ignoring whether the committed tokens provide complementary visual grounding. We identify a step-level limitation of this strategy in multimodal settings: high-confidence tokens selected in the same step can rely on overlapping visual grounding, introducing visual redundancy among the committed tokens and leaving less complementary visual grounding available for later decoding. To quantify this effect, we introduce the Visual Redundancy Index (VRI), which measures visual grounding overlap among tokens committed in parallel. To control this redundancy during decoding, we propose Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD), a training-free inference-time decoding method that uses token-to-image attention to prioritize visually complementary positions. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, VRCD reduces visual redundancy and remaining-position entropy with modest runtime overhead. In longer decoding experiments, it also achieves relative accuracy gains of up to 18.8% on M^3CoT and 6.9% on MMBench over confidence-based decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/infiniteYuanyl/VRCD.
Yulin Yu, Yan Chen, Rui Hu, Siddharth Suri, Scott Counts
Generative AI is transforming the workplace by augmenting and automating cognitive tasks, reshaping how organizations work and innovate while raising questions about workplace inequality and the future of work. Despite rapid adoption, empirical evidence on how these tools alter work practices and generate productivity gains remains limited. We examine how AI use affects the quantity and nature of information work using digital trace data from the Microsoft M365 application suite across multiple large international companies. Specifically, we study how generative AI adoption shifts the balance between communication and productivity-oriented activities, such as content creation in Word. Difference-in-Differences analyses show that AI adoption is associated with significant increases in both productivity (21.2%) and communication (7.1%) application actions among users who used the AI system more than 100 times over a 20-week post-adoption period. Among users with 100-500 AI use instances, higher AI usage is also associated with continued increases in both types of activity. The smaller increase in communication represents an overall shift toward individual, documentation-focused work and reflects mixed changes in communication, including decreases in reading and organizing email, compared with more uniform increases in productivity actions. These findings suggest potential efficiency gains and reductions in information overload, while highlighting the need to ensure that AI adoption does not weaken interpersonal communication and the diffusion of diverse information that supports innovation.