Answer First, Reason Later: When Commitment Order Costs Accuracy in Diffusion Language Models
Masked diffusion language models revise many masked output positions in parallel. We call a token committed once it becomes visible and is never masked again, and call a response answer-first when the final answer commits before the reasoning printed ahead of it. On 1,069 GSM8K test questions, an explicit step-by-step instruction increases the accuracy difference between unrestricted decoding and a decoder that permits commitment only near the left-most unresolved position; unrestricted decoding also produces more answer-first trajectories. On MATH-500, the two LLaDA models spend most of a short output canvas on reasoning that commits after the answer, and the benefit of frontier gating d...
| Authors | Jewon Yeom, Jaewon Sok, Seonghyeon Park et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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