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.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mathematical Reasoning | MATH500 (test) | Accuracy36.6 | 381 | |
| Reasoning | GSM8K (test) | EM Accuracy77.6 | 35 | |
| Reasoning | COUNTDOWN (test) | Accuracy31.6 | 13 | |
| Reasoning | Sudoku (test) | Accuracy0.161 | 9 | |
| Reasoning | GPQA (test) | Accuracy0.277 | 9 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | MATH500 | Avg Diffusion Steps38.1 | 6 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | GSM8K | Average Diffusion Steps42.8 | 6 | |
| Reasoning | Countdown | Average Diffusion Steps40.4 | 6 | |
| Reasoning | Sudoku | Avg Diffusion Steps38.3 | 6 |