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arXiv · 2603.01367

DUEL: Exact Likelihood for Masked Diffusion via Deterministic Unmasking

Gilad Turok·Chris De Sa·Volodymyr Kuleshov
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Abstract

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate text by iteratively selecting positions to unmask and then predicting tokens at those positions. Yet MDMs lack proper likelihood evaluation: the evidence lower bound (ELBO) is not only a loose bound on log-likelihood, but, as we show, is also computed under the training distribution rather than the test-time distribution. We resolve this within our DUEL framework, which unifies leading MDM sampling strategies that employ $\textit{deterministic}$ position selection. We prove that DUEL samplers admit $\textbf{exact likelihood computation under the test-time distribution}$ -- giving MDMs $\textit{proper}$ likelihood, and hence proper perplexity, for the first time. This proper perplexity is the natural analogue of autoregressive perplexity and lets us revisit key questions about MDMs. $\textbf{MDMs are substantially better than previously thought}$: the MDM-autoregressive perplexity gap shrinks by up to $32\%$ on in-domain data and $82\%$ on zero-shot benchmarks. DUEL enables the first principled comparison of fast,parallel samplers across compute budgets -- an analysis impossible with the ELBO and unreliable with generative perplexity -- identifying a strong default method. Finally, oracle search over position orderings reveals MDMs can far surpass autoregressive models -- achieving $36.47$ vs. $52.11$ perplexity on AG News -- demonstrating the ceiling of MDM performance has not yet been reached.

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Gilad Turok, Chris De Sa, Volodymyr Kuleshov. 2026-03-02. DUEL: Exact Likelihood for Masked Diffusion via Deterministic Unmasking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01367

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