Routing by Reasoning Need: Trajectory-Aware Decoding Control for Diffusion Vision-Language Models — Paper

Abstract

Diffusion vision-language models generate answers through iterative refinement, exposing intermediate answer trajectories that can be inspected and controlled at inference time. However, this controllability creates a reasoning-need mismatch, where a universal generation length is applied to questions with different reasoning demands. Visually closed questions may be harmed by continued refinement after a stable answer has formed, whereas reasoning-sensitive questions may be harmed by premature commitment. We formulate this problem as reasoning-budget mismatch and study it in LLaDA-V. Rather than choosing a universal generation length, our training-free controller routes each example to early commitment, baseline preservation, or reasoning-supportive decoding using trajectory signals from answer closure, commitment evidence, and representation revision pressure, without using ground-truth answers. Across answer-focused, mixed-reasoning, and CoT-sensitive benchmarks, routed control improves robustness over fixed long decoding, pure short decoding, and single-rule interventions. The gains are not explained by shorter outputs alone. Answer-closed examples often benefit from commitment, whereas CoT-sensitive examples require preserving or supporting intermediate reasoning. Taken together, these results suggest diffusion VLM decoding should route inference-time control by the state suggested by the observed trajectory instead of relying on a universal decoding length.

Authors 4

Xiaoying Tang, Yixiang Liu, Zhonghua Wang, Zhongxing Xu

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.11315
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: new
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.11315
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.AI
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.11315
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.AI
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 12 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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T19

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2 h ago

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Authors: Yixiang Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Zhonghua Wang

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
Xiaoying Tang, Yixiang Liu, Zhonghua Wang, Zhongxing Xu	12 Sept 2026 04:12 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

12 Sept 2026
New paperPaperRouting by Reasoning Need: Trajectory-Aware Decoding Control for Diffusion Vision-Language Models
New paper: Routing by Reasoning Need: Trajectory-Aware Decoding Control for Diffusion Vision-Language Models
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Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.AI	feed	T1· Official	2 h ago	2

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