Steering Without Breaking: Mechanistically Informed Interventions for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2605.10971v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply uniform intervention at every denoising step. We show this uniform schedule is inefficient and degrades quality, and the damage compounds when multiple attributes are steered jointly. To diagnose the failure, we train sparse autoencoders on four DLMs (124M-8B parameters) and find that different attributes commit on distinct schedules, varying in timing, sharpness, and magnitude. For instance, topic commits within the first 2% of denoising on MDLM, whereas sentiment emerges gradually over 20% of the process. Motivated by these profiles, we propose an adaptive scheduling mechanism that concentrates intervention where each attribute is actively forming. An idealized allocation analysis predicts that attributes with more sharply concentrated emergence benefit more from adaptive scheduling, a prediction we confirm empirically. Across seven single- and multi-attribute steering tasks on four DLMs, adaptive steering consistently improves the control-quality balance over uniform and interval-restricted baselines.

Abstract:Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply uniform intervention at every denoising step. We show this uniform schedule is inefficient and degrades quality, and the damage compounds when multiple attributes are steered jointly. To diagnose the failure, we train sparse autoencoders on four DLMs (124M-8B parameters) and find that different attributes commit on distinct schedules, varying in timing, sharpness, and magnitude. For instance, topic commits within the first 2% of denoising on MDLM, whereas sentiment emerges gradually over 20% of the process. Motivated by these profiles, we propose an adaptive scheduling mechanism that concentrates intervention where each attribute is actively forming. An idealized allocation analysis predicts that attributes with more sharply concentrated emergence benefit more from adaptive scheduling, a prediction we confirm empirically. Across seven single- and multi-attribute steering tasks on four DLMs, adaptive steering consistently improves the control-quality balance over uniform and interval-restricted baselines.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2605.10971 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2605.10971v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.10971 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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Steering Without Breaking: Mechanistically Informed Interventions for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

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