SPG: Sandwiched Policy Gradient for Masked Diffusion Language Models
Authors: name: Chenyu Wang; name: Paria Rashidinejad; name: DiJia Su; name: Song Jiang; name: Sid Wang; name: Siyan Zhao; name: Cai Zhou; name: Shannon Zejiang Shen; name: Feiyu Chen; name: Tommi Jaakkola; name: Yuandong Tian; name: Bo Liu
Published: 2025-10-10 16:52:25

Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as an efficient
alternative to autoregressive models due to their ability to decode multiple
tokens in parallel. However, aligning dLLMs with human preferences or
task-specific rewards via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging because
their intractable log-likelihood precludes the direct application of standard
policy gradient methods. While prior work uses surrogates like the evidence
lower bound (ELBO), these one-sided approximations can introduce significant
policy gradient bias. To address this, we propose the Sandwiched Policy
Gradient (SPG) that leverages both an upper and a lower bound of the true
log-likelihood. Experiments show that SPG significantly outperforms baselines
based on ELBO or one-step estimation. Specifically, SPG improves the accuracy
over state-of-the-art RL methods for dLLMs by 3.6% in GSM8K, 2.6% in MATH500,
18.4% in Countdown and 27.0% in Sudoku.