The Confidence Shortcut: A Reasoning Failure Mode of Masked Diffusion Models

arXiv:2605.29123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-thought reasoning helps autoregressive models solve complex problems by generating intermediate steps that support later predictions. Masked diffusion models (MDMs) offer a similar opportunity through arbitrary-order generation: they can ideally reveal intermediate results along logical dependencies. In practice, however, standard decoding simply prioritizes high-confidence tokens, which need not align with this dependency order. We identify this discrepancy as the \emph{confidence shortcut}: models commit with high certainty to plau

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