Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

[Re] Improving Interpretation Faithfulness for Vision Transformers

This work aims to reproduce the results of Faithful Vision Transformers (FViTs) proposed by arXiv:2311.17983 alongside interpretability methods for Vision Transformers from arXiv:2012.09838 and Xu (2022) et al. We investigate claims made by arXiv:2311.17983, namely that the usage of Diffusion Denoised Smoothing (DDS) improves interpretability robustness to (1) attacks in a segmentation task and (2) perturbation and attacks in a classification task. We also extend the original study by investigating the authors' claims that adding DDS to any interpretability method can improve its robustness under attack. This is tested on baseline methods and the recently proposed Attribution Rollout method. In addition, we measure the computational costs and environmental impact of obtaining an FViT through DDS. Our results broadly agree with the original study's findings, although minor discrepancies were found and discussed.