Prefilling-dLLM v2: Learned Chunk Routing for Long-Context Diffusion Language Models
cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-10-13
Updated: 2026-10-13
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Diffusion language models apply bidirectional attention over the whole context at every denoising step, so a longer context makes each step substantially more expensive.
Abstract
Diffusion language models apply bidirectional attention over the whole context at every denoising step, so a longer context makes each step substantially more expensive. Sparsifying only at inference leaves the pretrained weights unchanged, so the model is never trained under the sparse pattern it runs with. We propose Prefilling-dLLM v2, which continues training a diffusion language model so that it routes with its native mask token. One mask is appended at the end of each chunk, and a learned role offset marks it as a routing slot. On every fourth layer, a query keeps a bidirectional local window and the top-K chunks scored from that mask; the other layers use a bidirectional sliding window. Starting from Dream-v0-Base-7B extended to 16K with YaRN, we compare Prefilling-dLLM v2 with bidirectional NSA, DSA, and SWA under the same layout, key budget, and dense initialization, using the same Fast-dLLM decoder. With the YaRN factor scaled to the evaluation length, Prefilling-dLLM v2 leads the other sparse methods on all three RULER tasks from 16K to 128K. Its mean accuracy at 128K is 7.4 points above NSA, the next sparse model, while DSA and SWA remain near zero. At the same length, decoding is 172x faster than with full dense attention.
Sources
- Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models
- LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding
- Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer
- Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers
- DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models
- Hierarchical Sparse Attention Done Right: Toward Infinite Context Modeling
- Mistral 7B
- LongLLaDA: Unlocking Long Context Capabilities in Diffusion LLMs
- MoBA: Mixture of Block Attention for Long-Context LLMs
- Large Language Diffusion Models
- YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models
- Sparse-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion LLMs with Dynamic Cache Eviction
- Olmo 3
- SparseD: Sparse Attention for Diffusion Language Models
- Fast-dLLM v2: Efficient Block-Diffusion LLM
- Fast-dLLM: Training-free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM by Enabling KV Cache and Parallel Decoding
- Prefilling-dLLM: Predictive Prefilling for Long-Context Inference in Diffusion Language Models
- Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Models
- LLaDA-V: Large Language Diffusion Models with Visual Instruction Tuning
- LLaDA 1.5: Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization for Large Language Diffusion Models
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