Context Tokens are Anchors: Understanding the Repetition Curse in Diffusion MLLMs from an Information Flow Perspective

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission8268 Authors

Keywords: Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models; Information flow

TL;DR: Understanding and Mitigating the “Repetition Curse” from the Perspective of Information Flow.

Abstract: Recent diffusion-based Multimodal Large Language Models (dMLLMs) suffer from high inference latency and therefore rely on caching techniques to accelerate decoding. However, the application of cache mechanisms often introduces undesirable repetitive text generation, a phenomenon we term the Repeat Curse. To better investigate underlying mechanism behind this issue, we analyze repetition generation through the lens of information flow. Our work reveals three key findings: (1) context tokens aggregate semantic information as anchors and guide the final predictions; (2) as information propagates across layers, the entropy of context tokens converges in deeper layers, reflecting the model’s growing prediction certainty; (3) Repetition is typically linked to disruptions in the information flow of context tokens and to the inability of their entropy to converge in deeper layers. Based on these insights, we present CoTA, a plug-and-play method for mitigating repetition. CoTA enhances the attention of context tokens to preserve intrinsic information flow patterns, while introducing a penalty term to the confidence score during decoding to avoid outputs driven by uncertain context tokens. With extensive experiments, CoTA demonstrates significant effectiveness in alleviating repetition and achieves consistent performance improvements on general tasks. Code will be made available.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 8268