Quan Chen
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2026
Decoding Diffusion Language Models with Foreseeing Movement
Yichuan Mo | Quan Chen | Mingjie Li | Zeming Wei | Yisen Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yichuan Mo | Quan Chen | Mingjie Li | Zeming Wei | Yisen Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) benefit from a flexible decoding mechanism that enables parallelized inference and controllable generations over autoregressive models. Yet such flexibility introduces a critical challenge: inference performance becomes highly sensitive to the decoding order of tokens. Existing heuristic methods, however, focus mainly on local effects while overlooking long-term impacts. To address this limitation, we propose the Foreseeing Decoding Method (FDM), a novel approach that integrates both local and global considerations to unlock the full potential, employing a search-based strategy to enable effective optimization in discrete spaces. Furthermore, by analyzing the consistency of chosen tokens in the full decoding process, we develop a variant, FDM with Acceleration (FDM-A), which restricts deep exploration to critical steps identified as the exploration and balance circumstances. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and model architectures validate the scalability of FDM and demonstrate the superior efficiency-performance trade-off achieved by FDM-A. Our work might potentially provide a principled step toward more powerful decoding methods for DLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/FDM.