# Efficient Diffusion LLMs via Temporal-Spatial Parallel Decoding and Confidence Extrapolation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30753 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30753/

## 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 45 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 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 45)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16834/) (2023)
- [Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05379/) (2021)
- [Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15487/) (2025)
- [Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05102/) (2022)
- [A Continuous Time Framework for Discrete Denoising Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14987/) (2022)
- [Fast-dLLM: Training-free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM by Enabling KV Cache and Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22618/) (2025)
- [Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01603/) (2016)
- [Scaling Diffusion Language Models via Adaptation from Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17891/) (2024)
- [Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17298/) (2025)
- [Scaling up Masked Diffusion Models on Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18514/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Fast-dLLM v2: Efficient Block-Diffusion LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26328/) (2025)
- [MiniCache: KV Cache Compression in Depth Dimension for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14366/) (2024)
- [Diffusion LLMs Can Do Faster-Than-AR Inference via Discrete Diffusion Forcing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09192/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Diffusion LLMs via Adaptive Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00413/) (2025)

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

- [CORA-Diff: Confidence-Oriented Residual Acceptance for Efficient Diffusion Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11235/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) support parallel text generation via iterative denoising, yet inference remains latency-heavy because many steps are spent on redundant refinement and repeated remasking of tokens whose final values are already determined. Prior acceleration methods mainly depend on step-local confidence heuristics or fixed schedules, which are sensitive to prompt and task variation and ignore strong positional effects within a sequence. We cast diffusion decoding as a dynamic control problem and show that token-wise denoising trajectories provide the key signal for reliable control. We propose a trace-aware decoding framework with two components. First, Temporal-Spatial Parallel Decoding (TSPD) uses a lightweight temporalspatial controller that consumes per-token trajectory features, including confidence, entropy, and momentum, together with token position, to decide when a token has converged and can be safely fixed. Second, we introduce Confidence Extrapolation (CE), a training-free state-space module that forecasts future logit trends with uncertainty to support proactive decisions, including safe look-ahead and targeted stabilization when trajectories are oscillatory or underconfident. Together, TSPD and CE reduce unnecessary denoising iterations while preserving output quality, and they compose cleanly with system optimizations such as KV caching.
