@inproceedings{fang-etal-2026-information,
title = "Information-Guided Frontier Decoding: Contextual Utility-Driven Commitment in d{MLLM}s",
author = "Fang, Xingyou and
Zhong, Jingxing and
Yuan, Xiaosong and
Zhang, Xiaofeng",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.589/",
pages = "12422--12435",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Decoding quality in diffusion multimodal language models (dMLLMs) depends heavily on the order in which masked tokens are committed. Existing confidence-based strategies prioritize locally easy tokens, but confidence does not necessarily reflect contextual usefulness. As a result, structurally easy tokens such as punctuation may be committed before informative semantic anchors, weakening context propagation and increasing error accumulation. We propose Information-Guided Frontier Decoding (IGFD), a training-free decoding strategy that ranks candidates using token confidence, neighborhood uncertainty, and structural commitment risk. IGFD encourages early commitment of reliable semantic anchors while delaying fragile structural tokens, improving contextual support during decoding. A dynamic candidate frontier further constrains token selection to locally expandable regions under the same decoding budget. The method requires no additional training, auxiliary models, or extra forward passes. Experiments across multimodal understanding, reasoning, grounding, and hallucination benchmarks show that IGFD consistently outperforms existing decoding strategies across the majority of benchmarks and diffusion MLLM backbones under identical decoding budgets."
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<abstract>Decoding quality in diffusion multimodal language models (dMLLMs) depends heavily on the order in which masked tokens are committed. Existing confidence-based strategies prioritize locally easy tokens, but confidence does not necessarily reflect contextual usefulness. As a result, structurally easy tokens such as punctuation may be committed before informative semantic anchors, weakening context propagation and increasing error accumulation. We propose Information-Guided Frontier Decoding (IGFD), a training-free decoding strategy that ranks candidates using token confidence, neighborhood uncertainty, and structural commitment risk. IGFD encourages early commitment of reliable semantic anchors while delaying fragile structural tokens, improving contextual support during decoding. A dynamic candidate frontier further constrains token selection to locally expandable regions under the same decoding budget. The method requires no additional training, auxiliary models, or extra forward passes. Experiments across multimodal understanding, reasoning, grounding, and hallucination benchmarks show that IGFD consistently outperforms existing decoding strategies across the majority of benchmarks and diffusion MLLM backbones under identical decoding budgets.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Information-Guided Frontier Decoding: Contextual Utility-Driven Commitment in dMLLMs
%A Fang, Xingyou
%A Zhong, Jingxing
%A Yuan, Xiaosong
%A Zhang, Xiaofeng
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F fang-etal-2026-information
%X Decoding quality in diffusion multimodal language models (dMLLMs) depends heavily on the order in which masked tokens are committed. Existing confidence-based strategies prioritize locally easy tokens, but confidence does not necessarily reflect contextual usefulness. As a result, structurally easy tokens such as punctuation may be committed before informative semantic anchors, weakening context propagation and increasing error accumulation. We propose Information-Guided Frontier Decoding (IGFD), a training-free decoding strategy that ranks candidates using token confidence, neighborhood uncertainty, and structural commitment risk. IGFD encourages early commitment of reliable semantic anchors while delaying fragile structural tokens, improving contextual support during decoding. A dynamic candidate frontier further constrains token selection to locally expandable regions under the same decoding budget. The method requires no additional training, auxiliary models, or extra forward passes. Experiments across multimodal understanding, reasoning, grounding, and hallucination benchmarks show that IGFD consistently outperforms existing decoding strategies across the majority of benchmarks and diffusion MLLM backbones under identical decoding budgets.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.589/
%P 12422-12435
Markdown (Informal)
[Information-Guided Frontier Decoding: Contextual Utility-Driven Commitment in dMLLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.589/) (Fang et al., Findings 2026)
ACL