FlowBlock: Wavefront-Parallel Decoding for Self-Correcting Diffusion Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17652v1
• Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:05:03 GMT
• Title: FlowBlock: Wavefront-Parallel Decoding for Self-Correcting Diffusion Language Models
• Abstract summary: Block-wise diffusion large language models (dLLMs) decode sequentially at the block level, enabling effective KV-cache reuse across blocks but making inter-block decoding strictly serial.<n>We propose textbfflowblock, a training-free parallel decoding framework built on two mechanisms.<n>It improves tokens per second (TPS) over LLaDA-2.1 and LLaDA-2.0, two serial block-wise dLLMs, by up to 2.95$times$ and 4.01$times$, while reducing latency by up to 53.6% and 77.1%
• Score: 16.404926372068047
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Block-wise diffusion large language models (dLLMs) decode sequentially at the block level, enabling effective KV-cache reuse across blocks but making inter-block decoding strictly serial. Prior work has attempted to unlock inter-block parallelism through post-training methods, but achieves only modest speedups and often degrades accuracy. We observe that self-correcting dLLMs offer a training-free alternative: token-to-token (T2T) editing can repair tokens drafted with a slightly stale upstream context, so a downstream block requires only an informative draft rather than a finalized predecessor. This turns block finality from a hard dependency into a scheduling resource. We propose \textbf{\flowblock{}}, a training-free parallel decoding framework built on two mechanisms. (i) \emph{Gated Wavefront Decoding} admits blocks into a bounded wavefront only when a readiness gate is satisfied, jointly refines active blocks via T2T editing, and commits blocks in order under a windowed block-causal mask that preserves exact frozen-prefix KV caches reuse. (ii) \emph{Heterogeneous Wavefront Packing} assigns each request an independent wavefront while packing asynchronous windows into dense, shape-stable batched forwards. Across different benchmarks, \flowblock{} improves tokens per second (TPS) over LLaDA-2.1 and LLaDA-2.0, two serial block-wise dLLMs, by up to 2.95$\times$ and 4.01$\times$, while reducing latency by up to 53.6\% and 77.1\%, respectively. It also improves average accuracy by 1.3 points. Compared with D2F, a training-based inter-block-parallel baseline, \flowblock{} achieves higher accuracy and up to 16$\times$ higher batched serving throughput.

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