# Elastic-dLLM: Position Preserving Context Compression and Augmentation of Diffusion LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18165 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18165/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion LLM and MoE inference, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 36 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Diffusion LLM and MoE inference](https://mlsanity.com/inference/diffusion-llm-and-moe-inference/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)
- [SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14469/) (2024)
- [Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07524/) (2024)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16834/) (2023)
- [KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02750/) (2024)
- [Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15487/) (2025)
- [Quest: Query-Aware Sparsity for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10774/) (2024)
- [Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17118/) (2023)
- [PyramidKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression based on Pyramidal Information Funneling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02069/) (2024)
- [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)
- [A Diverse Corpus for Evaluating and Developing English Math Word Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15772/) (2021)
- [LLaDA 1.5: Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization for Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19223/) (2025)
- [d1: Scaling Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12216/) (2025)
- [dLLM-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with Adaptive Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06295/) (2025)
- [LLaDA2.0: Scaling Up Diffusion Language Models to 100B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15745/) (2025)
- [Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11967/) (2025)
- [LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07055/) (2024)
- [dKV-Cache: The Cache for Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15781/) (2025)
- [ReSum: Unlocking Long-Horizon Search Intelligence via Context Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13313/) (2025)
- [ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00615/) (2025)
- [FlashDLM: Accelerating Diffusion Language Model Inference via Efficient KV Caching and Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21467/) (2025)
- [DPad: Efficient Diffusion Language Models with Suffix Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14148/) (2025)
- [Attention Is All You Need for KV Cache in Diffusion LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14973/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Affix Cache for Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26140/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unlike autoregressive models, which generate one token at a time, dLLMs denoise a chunk of [MASK] tokens jointly and sample one or more tokens per step; despite enabling parallel decoding, this process incurs substantial computational cost due to the large chunk size of masked tokens. We observe that much of this cost is spent on repeatedly processing the preceding context and many [MASK] tokens with the same feature representations, indicating considerable computational redundancy. In this work, we revisit dLLM's redundancy from the perspective of [MASK] tokens. Through systematic analysis, we verify the redundancy of [MASK] tokens while revealing their critical role in providing structural information. Guided by these findings, we propose position-preserving [MASK] token compression and terminal-aware augmentation. By compressing redundant [MASK] computation, this approach accelerates decoding and further provides a natural extension toward context-folding-like long-context scaling under limited input-length constraints for full-sequence dLLMs such as LLaDA-8B-Instruct and LLaDA-1.5. Moreover, for block dLLMs such as LLaDA2.0-mini, it augments the context with a protected terminal [MASK] token to enhance generation quality with negligible overhead.