Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Test-time scaling strategies have effectively leveraged inference-time compute to enhance the reasoning abilities of Autoregressive Large Language Models. In this work, we demonstrate that Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) are inherently amenable to advanced search strategies, owing to their iterative and non-autoregressive generation process. To leverage this, we propose UnMaskFork (UMF), a framework that formulates the unmasking trajectory as a search tree and employs Monte Carlo Tree Search to optimize the generation path. In contrast to standard scaling methods relying on stochastic sampling, UMF explores the search space through deterministic partial unmasking actions performed by multiple MDLMs. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that UMF consistently outperforms existing test-time scaling baselines on complex coding benchmarks, while also exhibiting strong scalability on mathematical reasoning tasks.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Misaki, Kou, Akiba, Takuya
Topic: Topic Modeling
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7127973326
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