DreamReasoner-8B: Block-Size Curriculum Learning for Diffusion Reasoning Models
About
Block diffusion language models accelerate decoding through parallel block-wise denoising, yet whether they can be reliably scaled for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning remains unresolved. To this end, we develop DreamReasoner-8B, an open-source block diffusion reasoning model, and conduct a systematic study of how training and inference block sizes affect long-CoT reasoning. Our analysis reveals a stark performance disparity: training with large block sizes yields remarkably poor reasoning, whereas small block sizes preserve effective reasoning. To bridge this granularity gap, we propose block-size curriculum learning, which gradually transitions training from fine-grained to coarse-grained block sizes, thereby overcoming this limitation and enabling strong reasoning performance that generalizes across diverse inference block sizes. On mathematical and code reasoning benchmarks, DreamReasoner-8B achieves results competitive with leading open autoregressive models such as Qwen3-8B. This work establishes a practical foundation for efficient, reasoning-capable diffusion language models. We release our model at https://github.com/DreamLM/DreamReasoner.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commonsense Reasoning | HellaSwag | HellaSwag Accuracy76.6 | 897 | |
| Commonsense Reasoning | PIQA | Accuracy81.2 | 400 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | GSM8K | Accuracy (Acc)83.4 | 352 | |
| Language Understanding | MMLU | MMLU Accuracy75.4 | 307 | |
| Code Generation | HumanEval | Accuracy69.5 | 212 | |
| Reading Comprehension | RACE | Accuracy43.8 | 86 | |
| Question Answering | ARC-C | Accuracy (ARC-C)63.5 | 67 | |
| Commonsense Reasoning | WinoGrande (WG) | Accuracy74.2 | 38 | |
| Code Generation | LiveCodeBench | Score53.9 | 29 | |
| Question Answering | ARC-E | Accuracy (ARC-E)87 | 11 |