Tianze Zhang

1paper

1 Paper

11.9AIJun 29
Beyond Block Boundaries: Multi-Block Editing for Diffusion Large Language Models

Xingyu Mou, Zijin Huang, Tianze Zhang et al.

Block diffusion has emerged as the dominant paradigm for scaling discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs), because decoding text in fixed-size blocks preserves parallel generation within each block while keeping the quadratic attention cost tractable. However, this efficiency comes with a structural limitation: tokens near the end of a block are generated without access to future cross-block context, and once a block is finalized, its uncertain predictions become irreversible context for all subsequent blocks. This creates a block boundary problem, in which uncertainty accumulates toward block boundaries and early mistakes propagate throughout later generation. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Block Editing (MBE), to mitigate this problem by editing decoded tokens based on cross-block context. Following this principle, MBE first proposes a training-free decoding algorithm to edit the decoded tokens in previous blocks, which is achieved by re-opening a full-attention window over selected blocks. Given the mismatched attention mechanism between block diffusion training and MBE inference, MBE further introduces a supervised Fine-tuning strategy, which equips the model with bidirectional attention masks that progressively expands the editing span. Furthermore, it also extends SGLang with a multi-shape CUDA Graph pool and fine-grained KV cache control to make these variable-length editing passes efficient in practice. Experiments on LLaDA2.1-Mini across 13 benchmarks show that training-free MBE outperforms all existing decoding baselines while maintaining comparable throughput, and MBE SFT further brings a performance gain of 2.7. The largest improvements appear on tasks requiring strong long-range consistency, including +13.3 on AIME 2025 and +5.9 on ZebraLogic, demonstrating the effectiveness of MBE.