arXiv:2603.22248cs.LGcs.AI2026-03被引 11

提出首个扩散语言模型置信度解码的理论分析,证明其高效性。

Confidence-Based Decoding is Provably Efficient for Diffusion Language Models

  • 基于熵累积阈值的自适应解码策略,动态决定每轮解码多少词元。
  • 理论上保证在期望迭代次数为 $\widetilde O(H(X_0)/\varepsilon)$ 内达到 $\varepsilon$-准确采样。
  • 低熵数据下显著加速,无需调参即可适应数据复杂度。

扩散语言模型(DLMs)作为自回归模型的替代方案,支持灵活的生成顺序和多词元并行生成。然而,这种灵活性引入了自回归模型所没有的挑战:解码策略——决定每轮生成哪些及多少词元——严重影响采样效率。实践中,基于置信度的解码方法通过根据预测置信度自适应选择解码词元,表现出优异的实证性能。尽管如此,其理论理解仍不充分。本文首次建立针对置信度解码的理论分析框架,聚焦于一种基于熵和的策略:在每轮中持续解码直至累计熵超过阈值。我们证明该策略可在期望迭代次数 $\widetilde O(H(X_0)/\varepsilon)$ 内以 KL 散度误差 $\varepsilon$ 实现准确采样,其中 $H(X_0)$ 为目标数据分布的熵。当数据分布熵远低于序列长度时,该策略可带来显著采样加速,且自动适应数据内在复杂度,无需先验知识或超参数调优。整体结果为置信度解码提供了理论支撑,并可指导 DLMs 更高效解码策略的设计。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) models for language modeling, allowing flexible generation order and parallel generation of multiple tokens. However, this flexibility introduces a challenge absent in AR models: the \emph{decoding strategy} -- which determines the order and number of tokens generated at each iteration -- critically affects sampling efficiency. Among decoding strategies explored in practice, confidence-based methods, which adaptively select which and how many tokens to unmask based on prediction confidence, have shown strong empirical performance. Despite this success, our theoretical understanding of confidence-based decoding remains limited. In this work, we develop the first theoretical analysis framework for confidence-based decoding in DLMs. We focus on an entropy sum-based strategy that continues unmasking tokens within each iteration until the cumulative entropy exceeds a threshold, and show that it achieves $\varepsilon$-accurate sampling in KL divergence with an expected number of iterations $\widetilde O(H(X_0)/\varepsilon)$, where $H(X_0)$ denotes the entropy of the target data distribution. Notably, this strategy yields substantial sampling acceleration when the data distribution has low entropy relative to the sequence length, while automatically adapting to the intrinsic complexity of data without requiring prior knowledge or hyperparameter tuning. Overall, our results provide a theoretical foundation for confidence-based decoding and may inform the design of more efficient decoding strategies for DLMs.

扩散模型语言建模解码算法

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