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Revolutionizing Reinforcement Learning Framework for Diffusion Large Language Models

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arxiv 2509.06949 v1 pith:OWBKCNRA submitted 2025-09-08 cs.CL

Revolutionizing Reinforcement Learning Framework for Diffusion Large Language Models

classification cs.CL
keywords modelsdiffusionframeworklearningacrossb-instructinferencelanguage
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We propose TraceRL, a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning framework for diffusion language models (DLMs) that incorporates preferred inference trajectory into post-training, and is applicable across different architectures. Equipped with a diffusion-based value model that enhances training stability, we demonstrate improved reasoning performance on complex math and coding tasks. Besides, it can also be applied to adapt block-specific models to larger blocks, which improves sampling flexibility. Employing TraceRL, we derive a series of state-of-the-art diffusion language models, namely TraDo. Although smaller than 7B-scale AR models, TraDo-4B-Instruct still consistently outperforms them across complex math reasoning tasks. TraDo-8B-Instruct achieves relative accuracy improvements of 6.1% over Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and 51.3% over Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Through curriculum learning, we also derive the first long-CoT DLM, outperforming Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on MATH500 with an 18.1% relative accuracy gain. To facilitate reproducible research and practical applications, we release a comprehensive open-source framework for building, training, and deploying diffusion LLMs across diverse architectures. The framework integrates accelerated KV-cache techniques and inference engines for both inference and reinforcement learning, and includes implementations of various supervised fine-tuning and RL methods for mathematics, coding, and general tasks. Code and Models: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/dLLM-RL

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Cited by 31 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  17. HERALD: High-Throughput Block Diffusion LLM Serving via CPU-GPU Cooperative KV Cache Retrieval

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