Factual Access States in Diffusion Language Models: From Mechanism to Knowledge Editing and Retrieval
Factual recall is a lookup: some representation inside the network serves as the key, and what that key is made of decides which queries can retrieve the fact, what an edit must cover, and what a retriever can read. We call it the factual access state. In autoregressive (AR) models the subject position enriches attributes largely independently of the relation, and relation-specific selection happens later, at the readout position. In masked diffusion language models (DLMs) we find the state is assembled differently, and much earlier: in the first attention layer the wording of the relation is routed into the position of whichever entity is visible and the early feed-forward layers look th...
| Authors | Yuchen Guo, Zhuoyuan Mao, Yiwen Guo |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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