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Pivot-SD addresses the credit-assignment bottleneck in masked diffusion language models by selectively training only on high-impact "pivot" commitments rather than full sequences. This targeted self-distillation approach significantly improves performance on math and code benchmarks while reducing computational overhead compared to standard supervised fine-tuning or diffusion RL methods. The technique offers a more efficient pathway for scaling parallel generative models without sacrificing reasoning capabilities.
Pivot-SD: Efficient Self-Distillation for Masked Diffusion Language Models
arXiv:2610.03665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLMs) offer a promising parallel alternative to autoregressive models for complex reasoning. However, they face a distinct credit-assignment challenge, since a few commitments during denoising sharply reduce the uncertainty over the remaining masked positions and shape much of the response. Most post-training recipes for dLMs do not use this signal to decide which tokens to train on: they typically train on the final text or assign rewards to whole denoising steps, rather than selecting the individual commitments that shape the response. We introduce Pivot-SD, an efficient offline self-distillation framework that supervises only these high-impact commitments (pivots). Pivot-SD selects pivots using an information-gain metric measuring uncertainty reduction over the remaining masked positions. Pivots from successful trajectories are trained with cross-entropy, and pivots from failed trajectories with targeted unlikelihood, leaving the rest of the failed trajectory untouched. Using only 200 questions and four rollouts each, Pivot-SD improves LLaDA-8B-Instruct over full-sequence SFT and budget-matched diffusion RL baselines across math and code benchmarks.
Abstract:Masked diffusion language models (dLMs) offer a promising parallel alternative to autoregressive models for complex reasoning. However, they face a distinct credit-assignment challenge, since a few commitments during denoising sharply reduce the uncertainty over the remaining masked positions and shape much of the response. Most post-training recipes for dLMs do not use this signal to decide which tokens to train on: they typically train on the final text or assign rewards to whole denoising steps, rather than selecting the individual commitments that shape the response. We introduce Pivot-SD, an efficient offline self-distillation framework that supervises only these high-impact commitments (pivots). Pivot-SD selects pivots using an information-gain metric measuring uncertainty reduction over the remaining masked positions. Pivots from successful trajectories are trained with cross-entropy, and pivots from failed trajectories with targeted unlikelihood, leaving the rest of the failed trajectory untouched. Using only 200 questions and four rollouts each, Pivot-SD improves LLaDA-8B-Instruct over full-sequence SFT and budget-matched diffusion RL baselines across math and code benchmarks.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2610.03665 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.03665v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.03665 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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