A2D: Any-Order, Any-Step Safety Alignment for Diffusion Language Models

Wonje Jeung, Sangyeon Yoon, Yoonjun Cho, Dongjae Jeon, Sangwoo Shin, Hyesoo Hong, Albert No

Keywords: Discrete Diffusion, Safety, NLP

TL;DR: A2D aligns diffusion LLMs via token-level [EOS] masking, blocking harmfulness under any-order and at any-step.

Abstract:

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) enable any-order generation, but this flexibility enlarges the attack surface: harmful spans may appear at arbitrary positions, and template-based prefilling attacks such as DIJA bypass response-level refusals.
We introduce A2D (Any-Order, Any-Step Defense), a token-level alignment method that aligns dLLMs to emit an [EOS] refusal signal whenever harmful content arises. By aligning safety directly at the token-level under randomized masking, A2D achieves robustness to both any-decoding-order and any-step prefilling attacks under various conditions. It also enables real-time monitoring: dLLMs may begin a response but automatically terminate if unsafe continuation emerges. On safety benchmarks, A2D consistently prevents the generation of harmful outputs, slashing DIJA success rates from over 80\% to near-zero (1.3\% on LLaDA-8B-Instruct, 0.0\% on Dream-v0-Instruct-7B), and thresholded [EOS] probabilities allow early rejection, yielding up to 19.3× faster safe termination.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 7393