Think First, Diffuse Fast: Improving Diffusion Language Model Reasoning via Autoregressive Plan Conditioning

Researchers developed plan conditioning, a training-free method that significantly improves diffusion language model reasoning by prepending short natural-language plans from autoregressive models. The technique improved performance by 11.6 percentage points on math problems and 12.8 points on coding tasks, bringing diffusion models to competitive levels with autoregressive models.