LOCKR: A Hidden-State Trajectory-Guided Planner for Detecting and Repairing Stable-but-Wrong Lock-In in Diffusion Language Models

Abstract:Diffusion language models generate text through iterative denoising, exposing intermediate trajectories before final answers are produced. We identify a recurring reasoning failure, stable-but-wrong lock-in, where an answer stabilizes early around an incorrect value while substantial denoising remains. Surface-level decoding signals such as confidence, entropy, margin, and answer stability are insufficient to reliably distinguish correct from erroneous lock-in. We formulate selective reasoning repair as a lightweight test-time planning problem and propose LOCKR, a hidden-state trajectory-guided planner that decides when to allocate additional computation, expands a structured set of targeted repair branches, and selects the most promising continuation using trajectory-aware verification. Across two diffusion language models and three mathematical reasoning benchmarks, hidden-state trajectories consistently outperform surface signals and single hidden snapshots for both wrong-lock-in detection and repair selection. On natural evaluation distributions, LOCKR yields absolute accuracy gains of 2.21--5.37 percentage points across all five evaluated settings, with repair rates ranging from 22% to 41%. These results establish hidden diffusion trajectories as actionable signals for selective test-time reasoning repair.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.27220 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.27220v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27220 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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