Adaptive Block Diffusion: Resolving Training-Inference Mismatch in Diffusion Language Models

Abstract: Diffusion LLMs (DLMs) are typically trained under fixed context structures, restricting denoising to predetermined token subsets. This creates a mismatch between training and inference, where models must operate over arbitrary configurations, leading to degradation off the training grid. We propose Adaptive Block Diffusion (ABD), which resolves this mismatch by optimizing denoising risk over a distribution of prefix-window configurations. By treating the configuration as a stochastic variable, ABD trains a single model over the full configuration space without architectural changes. We show that generalization across decoding strategies is governed by the support of the training distribution, and that ABD guarantees denoising optimality for any inference policy whose configurations are covered during training. Empirically, ABD exhibits structural invariance across decoding scales, avoiding off-grid collapse and recovering a monotonic relationship between block size and perplexity, while matching or outperforming fixed-block specialists at their target scales.