Block diffusion enables efficient parallel refinement in diffusion language models, but its decoding behavior depends critically on block size. Existing block-sizing strategies rely on fixed rules or heuristic signals and do not account for the dependency geometry that determines which tokens can be safely refined together. This motivates a geometry view of diffusion decoding: regions with strong causal ordering require sequential updates, whereas semantically cohesive regions admit parallel refinement. We introduce GeoBlock, a geometry-aware block inference framework that determines block granularity directly from attention-derived dependency geometry. Instead of relying on predefined schedules or local confidence heuristics, GeoBlock analyzes cross-token dependency patterns to identify geometrically stable refinement regions and dynamically determines appropriate block boundaries during decoding. By adapting block granularity to the dependency geometry, GeoBlock preserves the parallel efficiency of block diffusion while enforcing dependency-consistent refinement that exhibits autoregressive reliability. GeoBlock requires no additional training and integrates seamlessly into existing block diffusion architectures. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that GeoBlock reliably identifies geometry-consistent block boundaries and improves the accuracy of block diffusion with only a small additional computational budget.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Local dependency patterns in natural language. Tokens with strong mutual interactions are highlighted using the same color. (a) A locally causal-dominated dependency pattern, where tokens follow a strong directional chain and intermediate tokens exhibit weak local interactions that do not form large, densely connected regions. Only small-size parallel updates are stable in such regions. (b) A locally parallel-dominated pattern, where tokens form dense mutual connections, enabling multi-token parallel refinement. These contrasting structures motivate adaptive block-size selection in dependency-aware diffusion decoding.
Figure 2. Dependency geometry of decoding under different regimes. (a) Autoregressive decoding induces a strictly sequential dependency structure, yielding a triangular attention pattern. (b) Block diffusion groups tokens into contiguous blocks, allowing bidirectional interactions within blocks while preserving causal ordering across blocks. (c) GeoBlock decomposes frontier attention into structured regions over historical tokens, candidate blocks, and future tokens, highlighting internal coupling, past conditioning, and future leakage. (d) Geo boundary selection evaluates candidate boundaries using a closure score and selects the right-shifted boundary within a tolerance of the maximum.
Figure 3. Accuracy versus number of function evaluations (NFE) on HumanEval, MBPP, GSM8K, and IFEval under Dream-7B and LLaDA-8B backbones.
Vanilla
Dynamic
AdaBlock
GeoBlock
Benchmark
B16
B32
B64
B16
B32
B64
B016
B032
B064
Bmax16
Bmax32
Bmax64
Dream-7B
GSM8K
ACC
74.60
73.62
74.83
75.13
74.37
74.68
74.98
75.44
73.31
77.79 ↑
76.88 ↑
77.86 ↑
NFE
256
256
256
151.72
154.69
160.83
167.44
161.62
161.26
169.80
167.96
168.92
HumanEval
ACC
57.93
55.49
57.93
53.66
59.15
55.49
51.83
53.66
57.93
55.49 ↑
59.15
55.49
NFE
512
512
512
258.98
266.19
267.44
303.15
294.35
289.89
292.10
288.53
292.10
Table 1. Accuracy (Acc) and decoding cost (NFE) across benchmarks. Bold indicates best accuracy per row. Red/green arrows denote improvement/decline of GeoBlock over Dynamic at matched block size.
Dream
LLaDA
Benchmark
Block Length
Extra NFE
Block Length
Extra NFE
GSM8K
13.72±5.87
0.08
13.42±5.69
0.08
HumanEval
14.33±4.95
0.12
14.99±5.26
0.14
MBPP
16.54±4.79
0.15
19.76±5.96
0.29
MATH
11.81±5.14
0.14
11.67±5.31
0.15
IFEval
17.86±6.05
0.07
18.65±6.35
0.08
Table 2. Block length and additional NFE ratio of GeoBlock.
Benchmark
Metric
0
0.25
0.5
1.0
Dream-7B
Acc
76.65
76.88
76.88
76.73
NFE
169.40
164.15
167.96
172.57
LLaDA-8B
Acc
81.19
81.35
81.88
80.82
NFE
98.72
102.51
100.05
103.05
Table 3. Effect of the anchoring coefficient under matched decoding budgets.
δ
Acc
NFE
Block Len.
0
80.74
115.03
6.59±3.12
0.05
80.74
102.99
10.28±4.21
0.1
81.88
100.05
13.42±5.69
0.2
80.21
98.64
19.57±9.33
Table 4. Effect of the right-shift tolerance on boundary selection.
Layer
Weight
Acc
NFE
2-6-10
0.1, 0.3, 0.6
79.15
123.33
0.6, 0.3, 0.1
81.12
127.56
0.333, 0.333, 0.334
80.67
126.26
16-21-26
0.1, 0.3, 0.6
80.59
100.61
0.6, 0.3, 0.1
81.12
105.35
0.333, 0.333, 0.334
81.88
100.05
Table 5. Layer and weight configurations on GSM8K (LLaDA, threshold=0.9, δ=0 ).
Figure 4. Block boundary inference under dependency geometry during diffusion decoding. Top: Fused attention map within the frontier window, revealing internal cohesion and cross-boundary dependencies. Bottom: Block closure score as a function of candidate boundary position. The selected boundary (dashed line) corresponds to the largest candidate block whose closure score remains near-optimal, allowing stable commitment of a structurally coherent token subset.
Diffusion language model decoding generates text through iterative parallel refinement, balancing fewer denoising steps with accuracy, coherence, and control.
Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, and blockwise decoding improves their practicality by committing tokens in local blocks. However, existing blockwise methods typically rely on fixed block sizes or delimiter-based runtime signals, which do not necessarily align with semantic boundaries. In this paper, we propose SemBlock, a semantic-boundary-driven dynamic block decoding framework for diffusion LLMs. SemBlock formulates dynamic block construction as semantic boundary prediction and trains lightweight predictors on frozen LLaDA hidden states. To provide supervision, we construct SemBound, a semantic-boundary dataset that derives boundary labels from discourse units, reasoning steps, and implementation spans across natural language, math, and code tasks. During inference, SemBlock uses predicted boundary probabilities to select the ending position of each dynamic block. Experiments on GSM8K, IFEval, MATH, and HumanEval show that SemBlock consistently improves over fixed-block decoding and AdaBlock. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/TH-AI-Lab-PKU/SemBlock.
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are typically trained under fixed context structures, restricting denoising to predetermined token subsets. This creates a mismatch between training and inference, where models must operate over arbitrary configurations, leading to degradation off the training grid. We propose Adaptive Block Diffusion (ABD), which resolves this mismatch by optimizing denoising risk over a distribution of prefix-window configurations. By treating the configuration as a stochastic variable, ABD trains a single model over the full configuration space without architectural changes. We show that generalization across decoding strategies is governed by the support of the training distribution, and that ABD guarantees denoising optimality for any inference policy whose configurations are covered during training. Empirically, ABD exhibits structural invariance across decoding scales, avoiding off-grid collapse and recovering a monotonic relationship between block size and perplexity, while matching or outperforming fixed-block specialists at their target scales.
Block Diffusion Language Models (BD-LMs) improve diffusion-based text generation with KV caching and flexible-length generation. A natural next step is to extend them from Single-Block Diffusion (SingleBD) to Multi-Block Diffusion (MultiBD), where a running-set of consecutive blocks is decoded concurrently for inter-block parallelism. However, existing BD-LMs are mostly trained under teacher forcing, where the model observes only one noisy block conditioned on a clean prefix. While the recent diffusion forcing strategy introduces visibility among multiple noisy blocks, its training states still differ from MultiBD inference, where decoding operates on a bounded running-set with heterogeneous slot-wise noise patterns. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Block Diffusion Language Models (MBD-LMs), obtained by post-training BD-LMs with Multi-block Teacher Forcing (MultiTF). MultiTF integrates teacher forcing and diffusion forcing by training on bounded noise-groups conditioned on clean prefixes, with randomized noise-schedulers that better match MultiBD inference states. To make MultiBD practically executable, we further introduce an optimized decoding algorithm based on the Block Buffer mechanism that preserves prefix-cache reuse, keeps input shapes static, and translates increased decoding parallelism into wall-clock acceleration. Empirically, MBD-LLaDA2-Mini increases average Tokens Per Forward pass (TPF) from 3.47 to 6.19 and improves average accuracy from 79.95% to 81.03%; when combined with DMax, MBD-LLaDA2-Mini-DMax reaches an average TPF of 9.34 with only a 1.02% accuracy drop on math and code benchmarks.
Yijie Jin, Jiajun Xu, Yuxuan Liu +8
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Xi’an Jiao Tong University · Huawei