Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.32096

DELA: Learning Controllable Edits for Diffusion Language Models

Abstract

Diffusion language models (DLMs) support bidirectional denoising and iterative refinement, but generation remains largely controlled by token-level masking schedules. This leaves draft-level refinement implicit and limits explicit control over when to insert missing content, delete redundant spans, revisit uncertain regions, or stop editing. We introduce Diffusion Editing Language Adapter (DELA), a plug-in framework that enables controllable draft refinement with a frozen DLM. DELA operates on clean, variable-length drafts using four explicit editing actions: Insert, Delete, Remask, and Stop. The controller determines when and where to edit the draft, while the frozen DLM fills masked regions through denoising, separating high-level edit control from token-level generation. A naive single-phase editor would be computationally expensive because arbitrary interior edits can disrupt prefix stability and limit reliable KV-cache reuse. To address this, DELA uses a two-phase decoding procedure: a fast, append-only drafting phase that supports KV-cache reuse, followed by a global refinement phase that enables targeted non-monotonic edits to the full draft. We train the controller using a staged curriculum that begins with learning local edit priors from synthetic recovery tasks and mined actions that improve draft quality. Subsequent stages refine edit selection through rollout-based outcome preferences and alignment with downstream task feedback. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation show that DELA achieves gains of up to 5.5 percentage points over direct diffusion decoding while keeping the backbone frozen. DELA thus provides a modular approach to explicit draft-level control in diffusion language models.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Xinsong Feng, Chenan Wang, Leshu Tang, Johnny Liu, Dong Li, Da Li, Haipeng Chen. 2026-10-23. DELA: Learning Controllable Edits for Diffusion Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32096

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

RoSeViT: Role-Separated Vision Transformers for ARC Visual Reasoning

ARC tasks can be formulated as visual transformation problems, where a model must infer a high-level transformation rule from a small set of demonstrations and apply it consistently across a grid. While dense Vision Transformers (ViTs) perform well in this setting, they entangle local visual state and global transformation logic within a shared token representation, which can hinder consistent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce RoSeViT, a role-separated Vision Transformer that explicitly decouples high-level instruction inference from visual workspace computation. RoSeViT uses controller tokens to aggregate transformation-level information and workspace tokens to represent the visual grid, with a structured attention pass in which nonlocal workspace interactions are routed through the controller. This design is motivated by our formal analysis showing that enforcing a shared instruction representation can reduce the effective complexity of visual transformation modeling. RoSeViT outperforms dense ViT baselines under the standard VARC training and evaluation protocol for ARC. In a controlled backbone replacement setting, it improves ARC-1 accuracy from 54.5 to 56.6, and with recurrent refinement reaches 58.8. When integrated into the full system, RoSeViT-Ensemble improves performance from 60.4 to 62.6 on ARC-1. These results demonstrate that explicitly separating instruction and workspace representations leads to more effective visual reasoning on ARC tasks. GitHub repository: https://github.com/lz7fd/RoSeViT.

cs.AI↗

Learning to Model Optimization Problems from Solver Outcomes

Automating optimization modeling with LLMs is a promising path toward scalable decision intelligence, but existing approaches either rely on agentic pipelines built on closed-source LLMs with high inference latency or fine-tune smaller LLMs using costly process supervision that often overfits to a single solver API. We study how reinforcement learning from inexpensive outcome labels can improve optimization modeling and support reuse across heterogeneous solver environments. To this end, we propose Optimization Modeling from Solver Outcomes (OMSO), which uses reinforcement learning (RL) with a mathematical programming solver as a deterministic, interactive environment. Given a natural-language problem and a target solver, OMSO generates solver-specific code, executes it in a sandboxed harness, and converts execution outcomes into scalar rewards in a closed-loop generate-execute-feedback-update process. This RL formulation learns optimization modeling without process-level supervision and supports cross-solver generalization by switching the solver environment rather than reconstructing solver-specific datasets. Experiments on NL4OPT, MAMO, IndustryOR, and OptiBench across Gurobi, OR-Tools, and COPT show that OMSO matches or outperforms process-supervised SFT, supports zero-shot training-free transfer, direct RL training, and SFT-cold-started RL, and improves modeling reasoning and semantic correctness beyond solver API usage.

cs.AI↗

Forget Attention: Importance-Aware Attention Is All You Need

Attention retrieves content precisely, but its scores depend only on query--key products, leaving order and recency to positional encodings. Conversely, state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba-3 track order and recency through input-dependent state transitions that decay and rotate, yet compressing context into a fixed-size state hampers precise retrieval. Hybrids like Samba and Hymba exploit this complementarity only across layers or heads, so SSM transitions never shape attention scores directly. The closest prior work, the Forgetting Transformer (FoX), adds an input-dependent forget gate to the scores but reweights attention by recency alone. We propose SSM-Informed Softmax Attention (SISA), which builds Mamba-3-style state transitions, rotation included, directly into the scores alongside FoX's gate. Each logit receives the weight such an SSM would give that token pair: a decayed match between rotated SSM projections. This rotation already encodes relative position, so SISA drops RoPE; restoring it raises loss. SISA outperforms parameter-matched Transformer and FoX in language modeling and length extrapolation. Among the attention models we compare, hybrids included, only SISA benefits from context beyond the training window. Building SSM transitions into the scores yields stronger attention, and our kernels make it faster and leaner than baselines on their official or standard kernels.

cs.AI↗