We present DMax, a new paradigm for efficient diffusion language models (dLLMs). It mitigates error accumulation in parallel decoding, enabling aggressive decoding parallelism while preserving generation quality. Unlike conventional masked dLLMs that decode through a binary mask-to-token transition, DMax reformulates decoding as a progressive self-refinement from mask embeddings to token embeddings. At the core of our approach is On-Policy Uniform Training, a novel training strategy that efficiently unifies masked and uniform dLLMs, equipping the model to recover clean tokens from both masked inputs and its own erroneous predictions. Building on this foundation, we further propose Soft Parallel Decoding. We represent each intermediate decoding state as an interpolation between the predicted token embedding and the mask embedding, enabling iterative self-revising in embedding space. Extensive experiments across a variety of benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DMax. Compared with the original LLaDA-2.0-mini, our method improves TPF on GSM8K from 2.04 to 5.47 while preserving accuracy. On MBPP, it increases TPF from 2.71 to 5.86 while maintaining comparable performance. On two H200 GPUs, our model achieves an average of 1,338 TPS at batch size 1. Code is available at: https://github.com/czg1225/DMax
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Comparison between the original LLaDA-2.0-mini and our proposed DMax. Unlike the original binary mask-to-token decoding process, DMax introduces a self-revising mask-to-hybrid-embedding-to-token process, enabling highly parallel decoding without accuracy dropping.
Figure 2: Overview of the proposed On-Policy Uniform Training.
Figure 3: Overview of the Soft Parallel Decoding procedure in DMax.
Benchmark
Method
TPF ↑
TPS ↑
Acc. ↑
AUP Score ↑
Math & Reasoning Benchmarks
GSM8K
LLaDA-2.0-mini
2.04
512
92.6%
340
Hierarchical Decoding
2.44
577
91.6%
357
dParallel SFT
2.79
721
92.3%
395
Uniform Diffusion Training
2.26
493
68.7%
0
DMax-Math
5.48
1258
92.1%
557
Table 1: Comparison with the original model and different baselines. For our DMax-Math model, we set the decoding threshold to 0.5; for the DMax-Coder model, we set it to 0.65. In addition to TPF, TPS, and accuracy, we also report the AUP score to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of parallel decoding performance. All evaluations are under zero-shot and a batch size of 1.
Figure 4: Comparison of accuracy-TPF trade-off curves between original LLaDA-2.0-mini model and our method. We present curves on GSM8K, MATH500, HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks.
Benchmarks
LLaDA-2.0-mini
DMax
TPF ↑
Acc. ↑
TPF ↑
Acc. ↑
GSM8K
2.04
92.6%
3.54 (+1.50)
93.4% (+0.8%)
MATH500
2.58
75.8%
3.45 (+0.87)
78.0% (+2.2%)
Minerva-Algebra
3.01
91.4%
4.96 (+1.95)
93.6% (+2.2%)
ASDIV
2.03
92.8%
3.10 (+1.07)
93.5% (+0.7%)
HumanEval-Instruct
4.38
84.2%
4.58 (+0.20)
87.2% (+3.0%)
Table 2: Our proposed new paradigm also improves the model’s accuracy at low parallelism.
Train
Inference
τdec=0.95
τdec=0.50
τdec=0.0
On-Policy Rollout
Contiguous Prefix
Hybrid Embedding
TPF ↑
Acc. ↑
TPF ↑
Acc. ↑
TPF ↑
Acc. ↑
2.04
92.6%
4.47
78.0%
7.86
0.9%
✓
✓
1.04
0.0%
1.73
0.0%
5.39
0.0%
✓
2.95
92.6%
5.14
90.1%
5.89
68.2%
✓
✓
2.85
93.0%
5.28
91.3%
5.89
68.2%
✓
✓
3.25
92.8%
5.64
91.4%
6.01
90.4%
Table 3: Ablation on different training and inference strategies with different decoding parallelism.
Convergence
GSM8K
MBPP
Consistency
Confidence
TPF ↑
Acc. ↑
TPF ↑
Acc. ↑
✓
5.13
92.1%
5.16
79.9%
✓
2.28
92.2%
3.36
80.1%
✓
✓
5.48
92.1%
5.86
79.2%
Table 4: Ablation study on block-level convergence criteria. The decoding threshold is set to 0.5.