# Progressive Refinement Regulation for Accelerating Diffusion Language Model Decoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04514 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04514/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Discrete and text diffusion, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 62 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Discrete and text diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/discrete-and-text-diffusion/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
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- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Trust Region Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05477/) (2015)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01318/) (2023)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)
- [Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07524/) (2024)
- [Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15487/) (2025)
- [Fast-dLLM: Training-free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM by Enabling KV Cache and Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22618/) (2025)
- [Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09573/) (2025)
- [Your Absorbing Discrete Diffusion Secretly Models the Conditional Distributions of Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03736/) (2024)
- [Discrete Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15595/) (2024)
- [Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17298/) (2025)
- [Train for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Understanding Token Ordering in Masked Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06768/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02037/) (2021)
- [Masked Diffusion Models are Secretly Time-Agnostic Masked Models and Exploit Inaccurate Categorical Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02908/) (2024)
- [Scaling up Masked Diffusion Models on Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18514/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion language models generate text through iterative denoising under a uniform refinement rule applied to all tokens. However, tokens stabilize at different rates in practice, leading to substantial redundant refinement and motivating refinement control over the denoising process. Existing approaches typically assess refinement necessity from instantaneous, step-level signals under a fixed decoding process. In contrast, whether a token has converged is defined by how its prediction changes along its future refinement trajectory. Moreover, changing the refinement rule reshapes future refinement trajectories, which in turn determine how refinement rules should be formulated, making refinement control inherently dynamic. We propose Progressive Refinement Regulation (PRR), a progressive, trajectory-grounded refinement control framework that derives a token-level notion of empirical convergence progress from full decoding rollouts. Based on this signal, PRR learns a lightweight token-wise controller to regulate refinement via temperature-based distribution shaping under a progressive self-evolving training scheme. Experiments show that PRR substantially accelerates diffusion language model decoding while preserving generation quality.