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EDIT: Early Diffusion Inference Termination for dLLMs Based on Dynamics of Training Gradients

About

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) refine token generations through iterative denoising, but answers often stabilize before all steps complete. We propose EDIT (Early Diffusion Inference Termination), an inference-time criterion that adaptively stops denoising once sufficient reasoning stability relative to training-time reasoning is detected. EDIT monitors the alignment between token activations and a reasoning map derived from AdamW-aggregated LoRA updates captured during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). During training, optimization dynamics generate rich metadata about parameter importance that in prior methods is typically discarded upon model release. We preserve this information as a compact representation of learned reasoning pathways. During inference, alignment scores are converted to a distribution over the tokens already unmasked at the current denoising step, and convergence is detected when KL divergence between consecutive steps falls below a threshold on the matched unmasked (visible) tokens. Across reasoning benchmarks, EDIT reduces diffusion steps by 11.8% to 68.3% while preserving or improving accuracy in most settings, with approximately 0.02% storage overhead (about 1.5-2 MB for all QKV modules across 32 blocks in an 8 GB model). By utilizing training-gradient dynamics, our work opens a new research direction for reducing dLLM inference time and cost.

He-Yen Hsieh, Hong Wang, H. T. Kung• 2025

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Mathematical ReasoningMATH500 (test)
Accuracy36.6
381
ReasoningGSM8K (test)
EM Accuracy77.6
35
ReasoningCOUNTDOWN (test)
Accuracy31.6
13
ReasoningSudoku (test)
Accuracy0.161
9
ReasoningGPQA (test)
Accuracy0.277
9
Mathematical ReasoningMATH500
Avg Diffusion Steps38.1
6
Mathematical ReasoningGSM8K
Average Diffusion Steps42.8
6
ReasoningCountdown
Average Diffusion Steps40.4
6
ReasoningSudoku
Avg Diffusion Steps38.3
6
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