Masked diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative parallel decoding, but at low step budgets, committing many tokens independently can produce premature termination or repetitive outputs. Continuous embedding-space denoising can mitigate this failure mode by maintaining soft states for all positions, yet training such models from scratch at scale remains challenging. We show that a pretrained masked DLM can instead be efficiently adapted to support continuous denoising. Starting from LLaDA-8B-Instruct, we perform only 1,000 steps of continued pretraining with Discrete Stochastic Localization (DSL), replacing binary masking with continuous per-token Gaussian noise mapped to soft embedding mixtures. The adapted model supports SDE-based inference that evolves all positions jointly and defers hard token commitment to the final step. At ≤16 denoising evaluations, DSL-LLaDA substantially mitigates the premature-termination and repetition tradeoff in open-ended generation and achieves the best ROUGE-1 among the evaluated diffusion baselines on all four zero-shot summarization benchmarks. The same adaptation also enables selective correction of corrupted tokens while preserving more than 98% of clean tokens. Same-compute controls indicate that these behaviors arise from continuous-noise exposure rather than additional training alone.

Causal reasoning (CR) is a crucial aspect of intelligence, essential for problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding the world. While language models (LMs) can generate rationales for their outputs, their ability to reliably perform causal reasoning remains uncertain, often falling short in tasks requiring a deep understanding of causality. In this paper, we introduce CausalEval, a comprehensive review of research aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning, coupled with an empirical evaluation of current models and methods. We categorize existing methods based on the role of LMs: either as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional CR methods, followed by a detailed discussion of methodologies in each category. We then assess the performance of current LMs and various enhancement methods on a range of causal reasoning tasks, providing key findings and in-depth analysis. Finally, we present insights from current studies and highlight promising directions for future research. We aim for this work to serve as a comprehensive resource, fostering further advancements in causal reasoning with LMs.