Early Decisions Matter: Proximity Bias and Initial Trajectory Shaping in Non-Autoregressive Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.10567v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility for fully non-autoregressive decoding remains an open question, particularly for reasoning and planning tasks. In this work, we investigate non-autoregressive decoding in dLLMs by systematically analyzing its