DPad: Efficient Diffusion Language Models with Suffix Dropout

Xinhua Chen, Sitao Huang, Cong Guo, Chiyue Wei, Yintao He, Jianyi Zhang, Hai Li, Yiran Chen

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) parallelize text generation by framing decoding as a denoising process, but suffer from high computational overhead since they predict all future suffix tokens at each step while retaining only a small fraction. We propose $\textbf{Diffusion Scratchpad} (\textbf{\textit{DPad}})$, a training-free method that restricts attention to a structured subset of suffix tokens, preserving fidelity while eliminating redundancy. $\textit{DPad}$ integrates two strategies: (i) a $\textit{sliding window}$, which maintains a fixed-length suffix window, and (ii) $\textit{distance-decay dropout}$, which deterministically removes distant suffix tokens before attention computation. This concise design is compatible with existing optimizations such as parallel decoding and prefix caching, and lends itself to a lightweight implementation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks on $\texttt{LLaDA}$ and $\texttt{Dream}$ models demonstrate that $\textit{DPad}$ delivers up to $\mathbf{61.4\times}$ speedup over vanilla dLLMs while maintaining comparable accuracy, highlighting its potential for efficient and scalable long-sequence inference.