FEROM: Frontier Endogenous Reveal-Order Marginal Policy Optimization for Masked Diffusion LMs

Abstract

Masked diffusion language models generate text by iteratively unmasking positions, with practical samplers often selecting reveal positions from the model's own logits. The reveal order is therefore an endogenous latent variable of the rollout process with an enormous discrete latent space. Policy optimization objectives relying on pre-defined schedules or sampled trajectories introduce either bias or high variance. In this paper, we propose FEROM, Frontier Endogenous Reveal-Order Marginal Policy Optimization, which approximates policy gradients for the rollout-induced marginal response policy of masked diffusion LMs. FEROM derives a Rao-Blackwellized policy-gradient identity over latent reveal orders and expresses the resulting estimator as posterior edge occupancy on a reveal-state DAG. To make marginalization practical, we introduce Frontier Reveal Marginalization, a budgeted estimator that approximates this marginal edge structure by combining CDF-based computation of local probabilities of the endogenous reveal process with frontier expansion of high-mass partial states. Integrated into a GRPO-style objective, FEROM replaces single-path log-scores with a detached token-score surrogate over posterior-relevant reveal edges. Experiments on math and coding tasks show comparable or improved results over existing methods under matched scoring-state budgets. An offline proxy study further shows improved marginal-gradient approximation with increased scoring budgets.

arXiv commentNeurIPS 2026