TEST-TIME SCALING IN DIFFUSION LLMS VIA HIDDEN SEMI-AUTOREGRESSIVE EXPERTS

Jihoon Lee, Hoyeon Moon, Kevin Zhai, Arun Chithanar, Anit Kumar Sahu, Soummya Kar, Chul Lee, Souradip Chakraborty, Amrit Bedi

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) are trained to model extreme flexibility/dependence in the data-distribution; however, how to best utilize this at inference time remains an open problem. In this work, we uncover an interesting property of these models: dLLMs {trained on textual data} implicitly learn a mixture of semi-autoregressive experts, where different generation orders reveal different specialized behaviors. We show that committing to any single, fixed inference time schedule, a common practice, collapses performance by failing to leverage this latent ensemble. To address this, we introduce HEX (Hidden semi-autoregressive EXperts for test-time scaling), a training-free inference method that ensembles across heterogeneous block schedules. By doing a majority vote over diverse block-sized generation paths, HEX robustly avoids failure modes associated with any single fixed schedule. On reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K, it boosts accuracy by up to 3.56× (from 24.72\% to 88.10\%), outperforming top-K margin inference and specialized fine-tuned methods like GRPO, without additional training. HEX even yields significant gains on MATH benchmark from 16.40\% to 40.00\%, scientific reasoning on ARC-C from 54.18\% to 87.80\%, and TruthfulQA from 28.36\% to 57.46\%. Our results establish test-time scaling as a powerful principle for dLLMs, showing that the sequence in which masking is done can play a significant role in test-time scaling/inferencing of dLLMs.